Carousel of Progress: A Novel [Hardcover]

Katherine Tanney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 10, 2001

Meet Meredith Herman, a fourteen-year-old expert witness to the slow unraveling of her parents' marriage amid the lunacy of Los Angeles, 1978, a world of bell-bottoms, grapefruit diets, and plastic surgery. Meredith is a girl of a specific time and place tackling the universal challenges of boys, school, and parents. Her mother, Leigh, is a housewife suffering an excruciating and often hilarious midlife discontent, a malaise that leaves Meredith's father, Robert, genuinely baffled. As Leigh attempts to reinvent herself as a liberated lady - complete with assertiveness-training classes and a dalliance with an exotic artist - Robert runs for cover into a hasty second marriage. Through it all, Meredith and Leigh struggle in a combative mother-daughter relationship as wonderfully real as any in contemporary fiction.

Tanney's debut sparkles with pitch-perfect dialogue and an astonishingly accurate sense of place. This novel will take readers on ajourney of belly laughs and heartbreak. The Herman family's story will charm and captivate you long after you've turned the last page.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rambling, casual and intermittently amusing, Tanney's debut novel chronicles four years in the life of teenager Meredith Herman and her classically dysfunctional family in the sun-filled world of upper-middle-class Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Fourteen when the tale begins, Meredith is the quintessential adolescent: equal parts brat, pal, navel-gazer and careful observer of what, from the opening pages, is clearly a marriage on the rocks. The trouble begins when her glamorous and mercurial mother, Leigh, disappears from a family vacation in Sonoma, driving back to L.A. with Meredith's younger brother and leaving Meredith and her father to find their own way home. After the drama of this minicrisis, Meredith settles into a chronicle of familiar family upheaval. That the book is divided into sections by year and chapters by month highlights a distressing truth: despite a succession of significant, even potentially life-altering events Meredith's parents divorce; her father marries a dumpy screenwriter; her mother takes up with a string of bizarre boyfriends; Meredith gets a nose job, a mall job and a best friend Tanney's characters remain unchanging, frustrating amalgams of clich?s and inconsistencies. Family trips are the framework on which Tanney hangs her novel's important moments, from Leigh's dramatic exit from a Sonoma race track in the beginning to a disastrous Disneyland visit in the middle and a skiing venture at the book's end during which Meredith's maturation is signaled by her understanding of skiing, with its paradox of "control and letting go," as a pastime bearing relevance to life in general. The novel is just what its title promises though with such a tight, claustrophobic angle on such a baffling set of characters, the metaphor of choice might, instead of a carousel, be a Sit 'n' Spin. (July 17)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Coming of age is hard enough without the complication of having your parents come apart at the same time. Fourteen-year-old Meredith Herman should know. As she navigates her own difficult transition through high school, she's the star witness to her mother's struggles to find herself and her father's muffled and muddled reactions to it all. Against a backdrop of 1970s Los Angeles, Tanney chronicles the changes Meredith must endure with just the right balance of humor and sorrow. Meredith sees both the wackiness and pathos of her mother's love affairs and her father's brief foray into bachelorhood. She is vain enough to want a nose job and to relish the attention of the in crowd, and she is sensitive enough to hang on to her close relationship with her younger brother. This first novel is a lively and welcome addition to this genre. Recommended for public libraries. Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., NC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Villard; 1st edition (July 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375505377
• ISBN-13: 978-0375505379
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,999,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a new take on an old theme, July 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Carousel of Progress: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book covers ground you may recognize: teenage girl, living in Southern California, facing divorce and dysfunction. But it would be a real shame for it to get lost in the crowd, because Tanney crafts her narrator's voice so sharply that you cannot help but hang on her every word. Meredith Herman is fourteen, struggling to deal with a moody mother, a father who is a child himself, as well as finding her own way in a city and world where everything makes you have to grow up fast. Tanney's writing is fluid, funny, and at times heartbreakingly poignant. The only downside to this book is its title, which makes it sound like a textbook instead of the great read it is. Well worth the money and time.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A female Holden, and more., September 28, 2001

By 

Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Carousel of Progress: A Novel (Hardcover)

I'm always looking for a hip, current, female coming-of-age narrative to complement "Catcher in the Rye" in some of my classes. The most impressive story I've come across so far--Deborah Eisenberg's "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris"--is a bit sophisticated and elusive for younger readers to handle on their own. But "Carousel" is accessible as well as rewarding at the level of descriptive and metaphoric language (the carousel of the title, which refers to the old Disneyland ride, also symbolizes the narrator's leaving behind childish ways and even resonates with the carousel near the end of Holden's quest).

Initially I gave the novel 4 stars. Impressive as it is, it's no match for a dazzling debut such as Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." But when I look at the lists of current best-sellers, when I read nothing but pages and pages of plodding plot summary from college-age students, and when I see a literary landscape increasingly cluttered with "fantasy" fiction, it's easy to develop a fuller appreciation for a literary talent like Tennant's.

This is "authentic" imaginative literature. It's less about "captivating" (i.e. capturing) the reader's imagination than educating, or liberating, it. The author's narrative style leaves room for genuine "interpretation," for "making" as well as "receiving" meaning from the evocative patterns of imagery. Readers of "Carousel of Progress" are, like the novel's protagonist, challenged to abandon infantile carousels and cultivate, rather than surrender, their imaginations.

For the attentive, creative reader the novel holds many rewards--the love/hate relationship between mother and daughter, the portrayal of a double rite-of-passage (mother's as well as daughter's), the touching brother-sister bond, and the tensions between the teen-age Meredith who is the subject of the narration and the considerably older Meredith who tells the story.

Admittedly, the narration occasionally takes on a one-sided quality. More often than not, it is Meredith who plays parent to her childish, self-absorbed parents. And her account contains no small amount of male bashing, with Meredith's father being the first of a succession of male figures distinguished by their immaturity, egocentricity and flagrant disregard for the sensitive female protagonist. As a result, the climactic moment at which Meredith tells us she loves her father seemed "forced" to this reader--perhaps more reflective of the mature narrator than the 16-year-old who is the subject of her story.

These minor reservations aside, "Carousel of Progress" is a promising debut and an engaging work of literature. Like Holden, Meredith has a real nose for what's phony as well as a creative capacity for fabricating various roles in her search for identity and belonging. The novel is full of Meredith's humorous snapshots of friends and family as well as explicit sexual description that reflects the importance of these matters in young people's lives without gratuitous exploiting of the subject (in fact, I'd welcome the opportunity to defend the novel's treatment of sex before some PTA group). For the present, at least, I'm quite satisfied to be a matchmaker for the always stimulating Holden.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love & Sex in the age of Farrah Fawcett and Sonny & Cher, September 5, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Carousel of Progress: A Novel (Hardcover)

Meredith Herman is coming of age in the seventies. All the signs are there: Lying in the sun to get a tan. Drinking Tab soda. Frosted hair. Watching Fantasy Island on TV when it wasn't reruns! Her mother is seeing a therapist, and begins to challenge her traditional role in the household--that of caretaker and martyr. Divorce is uncommon, and the sexual revolution is just getting out of the starting blocks as Meredith becomes aware of human relationships (including her parents' disintegrating marriage), real boys, and the possibilities of sex and love. An especially telling and poignant moment unfolds when Mrs. Herman responds to her daughter, "'Mom'...is that all I am to you?" In that question, you know her sense of entrapment and isolated anguish... and the inadequacy of a 14-year-old's ability to come up with an answer!
Along with every teen who grew up in 1970s America, Meredith struggles constantly to become cool, and despairs of ever being beautiful or popular or even well-dressed. You love her courage and persistence as she renegotiates a relationship with her departing father, who has a horror of direct confrontation and tries to charm and joke everything into place instead; her younger brother, who is touching and sweet but also the annoying terror many of us recall from our childhoods; and not least of all, her mother, who in her mid-thirties rite of passage is evolving perhaps as quickly and as totally as Meredith herself.
The feel of this book reminded me of Judy Blume's "Wifey," a book that many teens growing up in the seventies read in secret when their mothers weren't at home. You get a confidential look into a REAL (istic) teen's everyday thoughts and life events. I was absorbed in it from start to finish and will buy an extra copy to loan to friends-- it was that good!