Bird in Hand: A Novel [Hardcover]

Christina Baker Kline (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2009

The accident was just that - an accident. It was dark, it was raining, Alison had two drinks in her, and the other car ran the stop sign. She just didn't get out of the way fast enough. But now a little boy - not her own - is dead, and Alison finds herself trapped under the twin burdens of grief and guilt, and feeling increasingly estranged from her husband...Charlie, who has his own burdens. He's in a job he doesn't love so that Alison can stay home with the kids (and why isn't she more grateful for that?); he has a house in the suburbs and a long commute to and from the city each day. And the only thing he can focus on these days is his secret, sudden affair with...Claire, Alison's best friend. Bold where Alison is reserved; vibrant where Alison is demure, Claire has just had her first novel published, a thinly-veiled retelling of her childhood in South Carolina (which is also Alison's, in a sense). But even in the whirlwind of publication, Claire can't stop wondering if she should leave her husband...Ben, an architect who is thoughtful, kind, and patient. And who wants nothing more than a baby, or two - in fact, exactly the kind of life that Charlie and Alison have...

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her fourth novel (after The Way Life Should Be), Kline traces the construction and collapse of two long-term relationships. On her way home to New Jersey after an awkward party for her lifelong friend Claire's highly autobiographical first novel, Alison gets into a car accident that kills a boy in the other car. Even though the accident wasn't her fault, Allison, a mother of two young children, is wracked with grief and guilt. Her husband, Charlie, also struggles with the impulse to blame his wife, especially as he longs for any excuse to escalate his nascent affair with Claire and end his marriage. Episodes detailing the inevitable collapse of Alison and Charlie's marriage, as well as Claire's marriage to her well-meaning husband, Ben, are interspersed with vignettes revealing the four friends' 10-plus–year history together. Shifting perspectives and thoughtful interior monologues reveal just how isolated, and in some cases misguided, the characters are. Kline's unflinching gaze and lovely prose sets Kline's novel apart from the herd of infidelity/marital ennui novels. It's well-done, thoughtful and thought provoking. (Aug.)
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Review

“It is both thrilling and terrifying to read this powerful new novel and think: this could be me. Christina Baker Kline takes us on an intimate journey with her characters, one that brings us dangerously close to the hidden truths about love, trust and friendship.” (Ellen Sussman, author of Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex; Bad Girls: 25 Writers Misbehave; and On a Night Like This )

“In BIRD IN HAND, Christina Baker Kline looks at marriage, at parents and children, pain and sorrow, and at all the questions that life asks us. This is a wise and lovely book.” (Roxana Robinson, author of Cost )

“Christina Baker Kline is a relentless storyteller. Once she sets her hook and starts reeling you in, struggle becomes counterproductive. The narrative line is too taut, the angler at the other end too skillful.” (Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and That Old Cape Magic )

“Kline’s unflinching gaze and lovely prose set [BIRD IN HAND] apart from the herd of infidelity/marital ennui novels. It’s well-done, thoughtful and thought-provoking.” (Publishers Weekly )

“Kline’s razor-sharp novel about love, marriage and obligation is a beach book only because you could zip through it anywhere.” (More magazine )

“[Bird in Hand] exhibits an unsparing eye for the telling details that reveal how people think and act.” (Library Journal )

“Kline explores the complications of the lines and bonds between marriage and friendship with honest and complex emotions on all four narrative fronts.” (Booklist )

“A gripping tale about two crumbling marriages, [BIRD IN HAND] offers a realistic and, at times, heartbreaking look at love and friendship.” (RealSimple.com, Entertainment Pick )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (August 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688177247
• ISBN-13: 978-0688177249
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,224,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christina Baker Kline is a novelist, nonfiction writer and editor. In addition to Bird in Hand, her novels include The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines and Sweet Water. She is Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University.

Kline was born in Cambridge, England, and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. In addition to Fordham, she has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women's studies at Yale, New York University,and Drew University. She is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship, a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Fordham Research Grant. She donates her time and editing skills to a number of arts organizations in New Jersey and Maine.

Kline is coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror. She also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She is co-author, with her mother, Christina Looper Baker, of a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, Southern Living, Ms., Parents, and Family Life, among other places.

Kline has worked as a caterer, cook, and personal chef on the Maine coast, Martha's Vineyard, and in Charlottesville, Virginia. She lives in an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband, David Kline; three boys, Hayden, Will, and Eli; and Lucy, an English springer spaniel. She spends summers with extended family in an even older house on Mount Desert Island in Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Four People, Two Marriages...This Bird Soars!, September 7, 2009

By 

Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bird in Hand: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

The thing about Bird in Hand is it's so darn page-turning GOOD! It rises far beyond a story of four people and two marriages to explore how our stories, our pasts, and our smallest gestures reveal who we are and what we need --without ever sermonizing. And it reveals how each loss -- no matter how searing -- always carries within it the the possibility of a new life.

Christina Baker Kline (how have I not read her before? That's going to be rectified!) focuses on four individuals: Alison, a suburban mother of two who is losing her bearings after a tragic accident that was not her fault and her husband Charlie, who has gradually absented himself from the marriage because of his obsession with her best friend. That friend is Claire, a flighty femme fatale and a debut author who's married to Ben, a kind and meticulous Harvard-educated architect.

It could be the stuff of melodrama...but in Kline's capable hands, it is not. In one telling passage, Kline writes about Claire, "It wasn't like Claire had fallen out of love with Ben...it as more like she had drifted, the way you do on a plastic float in a pool with your eyes closed, moving away from the edge without realizing it..." All of these characters in their own way are drifting. They are all living false lives -- some without even realizing it -- and going through the motions.

Each of these characters are flesh and blood people, complete with back story that reveals how they came to be who they are and why they make the choices they do. Whether it's Alison breathing in the aloe-scented baby wipes and antibacterial ointment she puts on her young toddler's finger or Ben doing his crossword puzzles to avoid the anxiety of building emotional chaos...whether it's Charlie who wakes up flooded with relief that Alison's parents have arrived, temporarily absolving him from dealing with his wife's mounting guilt and grief or Claire who is dredging up the well of her past in her "fictionalized" book debut, these are people who could be our neighbors...or could be you and me.

Ultimately, the characters realizing that "in the fear of losing what you had, you are left with something startling: a depth of empathy, a quivering sensitity to the world around you, and the unexpected blessing of gratitude for what remains." It would be easy to turn this book into a story of "good guys and bad guys." But this is an adult book about a world that is often complex. How well it works!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars People will show you who they are. Believe them the first time., September 28, 2009

By 

K. B. Fenner (Columbia, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bird in Hand: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I felt that the promo write-ups were a bit misleading--this isn't Alison's story--the story of the wronged wife whose life falls apart one evening--at least it is just barely that--the accident is the McGuffin that sets in motion the story.

Alison IS the Bird in Hand of the story. Her husband "settled" for her when he could not have another--the "two in the bush." Now he is having an affair with her estranged best friend from childhood, who has written a novel cum memoir about their growing up together. The story gives us insights into all of the players in this love quadrangle -- the wives and husbands of the pair having the affair, as well as the pair having the affair. Some come off more sympathetically than others. Perhaps the ending is a bit too pat, [partial spoiler alert] with the "wronged" parties rather easily coming to rights and the wronging parties getting their just desserts, but it does follow from the way the story was set up.

The pacing and writing make for a nice read and the insights are excellent--Maya Angelou would approve.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blindness and betrayal, December 6, 2009

By 

Kokopelli (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bird in Hand: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This book excelled at revealing the smallest nuances of feelings, denials, projections, and regrets that we all feel, especially in times of betrayal, whether one is the betrayer or the betrayed. We see into the hearts of each of the four major characters and wonder at how each one can be so blind to his/her own misperceptions and to those of the people closest to them. And yet all these insights do ring true as reflections of the human condition.

The structure of the novel is a bit confusing as it moves back and forth from the past to the present, despite the rather obvious hints of different fonts for past and present, and dates given at the start of chapters that relate past events. As one reads on, the time line becomes clearer, but it remains a bit shadowy. The book is also divided into five parts, each part being introduced by a profound bit of verse or a quotation that presumably relates to what follows. I had a bit of difficulty connecting the sentiment of the quotations with any obvious segmentation of the book, but perhaps that was exacerbated by the past-present switching.

I agree with one of the other reviewers that the plot set-up of the car accident didn't really work to explain the psychological crisis that Alison undergoes afterward. She truly is not to blame for the death of the child, despite her blood alcohol level being slightly above what's legal for driving. In fact, the parents' failure to stop at a stop sign and to have their child safely secured in his car seat in the back seat are all too obvious as the causes. Nevertheless, Alison begins a rapid descent into guilt-fueled depression and withdrawal, not that she was perfectly balanced before the accident. In fact, she resented her children's monopoly of her life, her own retirement from her profession, and her husband's increasing absenteeism. However, she totally misses the signs (and there are plenty) that he is cheating on her, and with her best friend no less. Then, when the accident happens, it seems to be the last straw in an already unfulfilling existence.

Charlie's and Claire's lack of remorse for their deception and betrayal is a bit perplexing. The only reflection that Charlie seems capable of is how he's going to miss the perfect suburban life style that he enjoys with Alison at home taking care of things, and how lucky he is to finally be getting the woman of his dreams, despite the high cost. And Claire comes across as an egocentric author in the first flushes of commercial success, who exploits and manipulates others for her own ends. And now she's decided she wants her best friend's husband instead of her own, even though she didn't want him years before when she could have chosen him over her current husband, Ben. My guess is that she might make a similar decision regarding what she really wants after a few years with Charlie.

Ben, Claire's husband, is perhaps the character I felt the most sympathetic toward. He is a decent, hardworking guy, not given to deeply introspective lapses. Although he's always wanted children and continues to want them, he gives in to Claire's refusal to consider trying again for a child after she has a miscarriage. In the end, he is the one who seems most likely to survive the emotional carnage and go on to a happy life.

Although some other reviewers complained about the non-resolution of the ending, I thought it was perfect and perhaps the most realistic part of the entire book. The fact that it resembled a plot simply running out of steam obscured the sad truth that that's how most divorce dramas end. All in all, I would recommend this book for its insight into the interior lives of modern American yuppies, and for its realistic portrayal of marriage. The author's use of language and her insight into the lives and minds of her characters make the book well worth reading.