The Boy on the Green Bicycle [Paperback]

Margaet Diehl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003

A memoir by the celebrated author of Men.

Memory can distort, diffuse, simply omit. Or it can clarify, confirm, preserve forever fragments from the flow of our lives. From such pieces, Margaret Diehl has re-created the enchantment of her large Southern family settled in the North, whose four siblings are exquisitely joined: "We each had our place in the family, each of us a different age, like a step, connected, and nobody else anywhere related to us as we were to each other. It was a metaphysical pleasure." They are by turns innocent, nave, joyous, bumptious, young, then suddenly slashed, stricken by a reality that attaches permanently, especially to her, body and soul: "My book of hours."

Her older brother, the most exceptional, the best-loved, the bright shining light of the family-and her absolute champion and hero-is killed. He is fourteen, she nine, and her small young soul is sent careening through the world in some entirely new and frightening way, imbued with an overwhelming sense of his absence from her eternity on earth.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The accidental death in February 1965 of Jimmy Diehl, just 14, sent the entire Diehl family into a downward spiral. But this searching, unsparing memoir by Margaret Diehl (just 9 when her brother died) suggests that there were plenty of demons lurking in their spacious Montclair, New Jersey, home long before a car hit Jimmy's green bicycle. Her handsome, sexy parents' lives were perfumed with the scents of cocktails and cigarette smoke. When he came home from his high-powered job in book publishing, her volatile father pushed his children away with angry words and retreated into solitude; he killed himself just a few months after Jimmy's death. Her mother moved the family to New York City, where she spent her afternoons shopping and her evenings on dates ("What else? What do ladies do?") while the three remaining children floundered. Margaret, the youngest, retreated into the fairy tales and fantasy books she had always loved; she and her sister resented the special attention their angry, unruly brother, Johnny, received. Looking back as an adult on those troubled times, Diehl delineates the stages of grief with poetic specificity. She survived, but her frank account makes it clear that a tragedy of such proportions was "like a meteorite pinning my life under it." --Wendy Smith --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In dissecting pivotal moments of her tragic New Jersey childhood (death and mental illness cripple her seemingly glamorous Southern-rooted family), novelist Diehl (Me and You, etc.) pieces together a sensual portrait of the artist as a young woman. Her domestic imagery, simultaneously soothing and uncanny, brings readers directly and joyfully into the 1950s and '60s household of her publishing executive father, effortlessly graceful mother and three siblings. Diehl respects her childhood self and takes care not to adulterate the girl's point of view with the writerly woman's: "Daddy in a suit. The warm pinks, aquas, and ice blues of my mother's clothes, her bright lipstick." The details leading up to the tragedies unfold with exceptional narrative restraint, infused with, but not rushed by, emotion. The death of her brother (killed on his bicycle), suicide of her father and despair of her mother ("I learned to make her drinks, and I made them strong. Mommy magic") register as the book continues and are colored by the child's developing sexuality and depression. A brief, spell-breaking final chapter summarizes Diehl's adult attempts to deal with her childhood trauma, and ends with a sentimental poem. If Diehl sometimes waxes too reverent about her past, the wonderfully rendered precocious enthusiasms of her childhood self always outrun her nostalgia. The story of her family's survival is testament to her mother's strength, and to her own. Agent, Carol Mann.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Soho Press (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569472017
• ISBN-13: 978-1569472019
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,378,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An astonishingly beautiful book, June 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Boy on the Green Bicycle (Hardcover)

I've never read anything like this before -- descriptions of childhood on a cellular level, what it felt like, smelled like, tasted like, and more -- other senses that live purely in Margaret Diehl's imagination but that resonate with ours. A hilarious, moving, compulsively readable memoir about beauty, family, aching loneliness and aching love of life. I couldn't put it down, didn't want to leave the mind of this child and the drama of her family. Diehl is a true original and takes you to places that seem like your own forgotten dreams.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intense and lyrical; fluid, poetic, wrenching: pure grief, June 15, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Boy on the Green Bicycle (Paperback)

This is a book about loss, lives shattered, the disconnection of those left behind, and the reality of going on with life after monumental tragedy as someone so different, so changed, that the sense of being human becomes impaired.

Sometimes like the wail of a wounded animal, always like the articulate discomfort of someone so intelligent that the mystery of death is an unaccustomed block, so sudden and so final, that she cannot accept it as so--a lifetime spent waiting to change the outcome, to go as Orpheus did to the underworld, for there must be some way to bring them back...

This book is so powerful that despite its very close focus on the feelings and experiences of the author as a child, it opens the sense one sometimes has of looking so closely at things that their reality and substance de-constructs within the mind, and falls apart.

The vision and memory of this child, now grown, whose father committed suicide within weeks of her brother's fatal bicycle accident are preserved in such a way as to fling her continually back to those years when her world was destroyed, and her home broken up, her pets put to sleep...is yet pure and limpid with clarity for the reader--the mixed feelings of relief and despair and the way they mingle and switch places...this book is so true, one need not have experienced anything like it as a child to understand completely and nod with recognition.

This book is a little masterpiece, reminiscent of the transformations in late nineteenth century French poetry, like Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal"--the transformation of the "base" into the eternal, into the flower, into a work of art instead of a scream.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blast from the Past, February 6, 2000

By 

Andree Pages (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Boy on the Green Bicycle (Hardcover)

The French word for a psychic is "une sensible," which translates as "a sensitive." In "The Boy on the Green Bicycle," which just won well-deserved recognition as one of the New York Times Most Notable Books of 1999, Margaret Diehl transmits an astonishing range of sensations and perceptions related to childhood which seem almost impossible for one human to have remembered, let alone to have borne. Impossible, that is, until you lie down with the book and open yourself to it the way Diehl opened herself to books as a child: "I had uncurled like a hedgehog, exposed my soft parts to the wave of the story." If the excruciating honesty of the book doesn't scare you off, you'll be afforded the closest thing there is to time travel--childhood unrolls itself before you, like the magic garden in Diehl's back yard. While the tragedies dealt with here, the accidental death of her idolized older brother and the subsequent suicide of her father, may lie beyond the reach of others' experience, Diehl's narrative of everyday childhood experience is unsurpassed. It is as if Diehl has suffered no memory loss, as if she has the sensations of a three-year-old or seven-year-old as fresh in her brain as when they were first imprinted. Her recollections of her intercourse with the natural world and of the relentless drama of family life, impossible for outsiders to grasp, are especially stunning. She delivers her own soul up to the reader, along with gentle but unsparing portraits of the entire family, in a fearless prose of vivid invention. Diehl is a writer not only for those whom language makes giddy, but for any reader as brave as she, any ready to receive the transmissions from this "sensitive," any reader honest enough to open up and say, yes, this is how it was...