Customer Reviews

The Center of Winter: A Novel

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The Schiller family is torn apart by mental illness. The autistic-like symptoms of their son, Esau, has brought Claire and Arnold's Schiller's marriage to the breaking point and Arnold kills himself with a single bullet to the head. In the aftermath, Claire, Esau, and the youngest Schiller child, Kate, must come to terms with Arnold's suicide and learn how to piece their lives back together. Claire's best friend, Donna, is also struggling with her husband's post-Vietnam, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and its resulting depression and alcoholism. Donna's son, Davey, helps Kate to cope with the death of her father while Donna provides Claire support. When Donna's husband also comes to a mental breaking point, the two families must learn to re-define what being a normal, small-town family is really all about.

Every once in awhile, I find a book that combines beautiful prose with a story I can't put down. The Center of Winter is one of them! This anatomy of a family torn apart by mental illness is so filled with the flavor of Northern Minnesota, I can almost taste it! The seasons of the region are cleverly used by the author as a metaphor for human emotion, the cycle of life and death, and the endless cycles of grief and acceptance. Hornbacher has captured the essence of the major turning points in life in which time both speeds up and slows down, when denial blends with the beginning of deeper awareness. The story is also the anatomy of a suicide and the author has made it impossible not to watch this unfold using a perfect mix of horror and compassion. The changes in narrative voice are a bit jarring, but Hornbacher couldn't have told this story any other way. The tale is more emotional for having avoided the exaggeration of the children's emotional responses. She avoided the risk of hypersentimentality by creating entirely believable characters who behave in entire believable ways. I cried reading this book and I almost never cry at novels.

In a small town in Minnesota, a man commits suicide, leaving a guilt-ridden wife, a 6 yr. old daughter and a mentally ill son. The story is told alternately by the widow, Claire, and the 2 children.
This year, I suffered my own center of winter. I wondered if I should be reading this story at this time of my life.
But start it I did and I found I could not stop reading. I cared about the characters, I wanted to know how they found their way out of their circle of grief.
The back cover promises that "you will be ultimately inspired" - and I was.
I will be getting a copy of Marya Hornbacher's first book, "Wasted".

I have regarded Wasted as my personal bible for the past 4 years and have been waiting for Hornbacher's novel since the first time I closed her tantalizingly chilling memoir. I purchased The Center of Winter and immediately became absorbed by the depth of each narrator. Initially I was worried that I would be let down - for so long I've held Hornbacher on sort of a pedestal and was fearful of being let down. Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong; Ms. Hornbacher has done it again - this time mastering fiction. With beautiful, elaborate descriptions, she accurately pinpoints all of the right words to illustrate universal human emotion that have never quite been voiced with such excruciating detail. The Center of Winter will rock you to your very innermost core, send shivers up your spine, and nestle itself into the darker recesses of your mind.

..and even more difficult to put down. Written with compassion for all of the characters, without trying to disguise their flaws, this story explores the secrets that exist in so many of our family stories. I found the change of first person narrator to be refreshing - rather like walking all of the way around a sculpture.

In The Center of Winter, Marya Hornbacher's affecting new novel, the Schiller family is living a suburban nightmare. Their youngest son, Esau is living on the edge; he's a mentally unstable adolescent who could boil over at any moment, and his sudden attacks are tearing this fragile family apart. Claire and Arnold Schiller, live out their lives under a veneer of mutual blame and a perpetual haze of alcohol. It comes to their youngest, the six-year-old Kate to shoulder the burden and find a way for them all to cope in this bleak and wintry landscape.

It is 1969 and the chaos of the Vietnam War has even reached the small town of Motley, Minnesota. It's a town of "old brick storefronts," but on the corner of Madison Street in their "pale eggshell blue house," Schiller family are just trying to cope with their own set of circumstances. For them, winters are indeed harsh and bleak. This is an insular world where the women are frightened of "getting on," tormented by presence or absence of children.

This is also a world where husbands are primarily occupied with labor or living, or having been recently killed in Vietnam, or have simply having walked off, their vicious, voracious bitterness given wide birth. Men and woman both are victims of circumstance and fate. In the Schiller family, it is Arnold who is left to mostly shoulder the burden. Feeling that he has failed his son, and that he can no longer be a fitting husband to Claire, he makes a fatal choice, and in the aftermath; it is Claire, Esau, and Kate that must piece their lives back together.

Solace for the family comes in the form of Donna, a friendly neighbour, a true stalwart. But Donna has demons of her own: She's struggling with her husband's post-Vietnam, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and its resulting depression and alcoholism. Donna's son, Davey, helps Kate to cope her loss, while Donna provides Claire support. When Donna's husband also comes to a mental breaking point, the two families must learn to cope and re-learn what life in the confines of a small town is really like.

Hornbacher adroitly maps out the interior landscape of these people's lives, as she splits the narrative between Claire, Esau, and Kate. The nuances are all there: the sharp observations of the human experience, the beautiful descriptions of domestic lives, and the pivotal role that the family plays in loving relationships. Kate observes that her father was "huge and irretrievable like an era." He was the same as his profound, useless, oppressive love of his wife, and his desperate love for his son. "He was the amorphous shape of need, a need that grasped at whatever was left."

Claire and Arnold fought almost companionably as if it were as good a way as any to converse. But the ever-present cruelty was always there, and like "the center of winter," certain things just tended towards their own center and imploded. They're marriage just seemed to crack down the center "the way a frozen lake will crack: deeply, invisibly, without explanation."

Hornbacher's characters live in a nether world where there is much bitterness and sadness, but there is also room for much love. Claire loves her two children in a way that is fierce and abstracted like an animal. And as Esau observes: "We were something that had happened to her and she lived with, loving each according to our need and without frills." This novel absolutely reverberates with emotion and the subtle language of frustration and of love.

The Center of Winter also deals with the emotional aspects of mental illness, especially when a child, much loved, is forced to be institutionalized, shattering the family circle. But after a lot grief and pain, a grown up Kate, at the end of the novel, looks back on their lives and realizes that you cannot live with the past cluttering up the house. You cannot waste your love. You must love what is left and have the will to live. "People need their broken places, their secrets and their stories. Once you have these things, only then you can go on." Mike Leonard July 05.

When I heard Marya Hornbacher read aloud from this book I realized how dark and scary it really was. Not just because suicide and mental illness are dark and scary, but because being trapped in your own mind when something terrible has happened can be even worse. I think her choice to tell the story in first-person narrative style is both a real strength and a frustating thing. It can lead to a kind of claustrophobic situation. The reason it works so imcredibly is because she is a gorgeous writer.

I also highly recommend THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore. I heard her read at the same time as Hornbacher and she's amazing. The book is tragic too, but more plot driven,with equally gorgeous writing, more hopeful than the other.

Both books show writers really how to write.

Like many others I read Hornbacher's memoir 'Wasted' and was impressed at her vast talents as a writer. I was therefore very keen to read her first work of fiction, if a little nervous that it wouldn't match up to it's predecessor's standard.

As it turns out, my nerves were completetly unneccesary. 'The Centre of Winter' is, in a single word, breathtaking. Telling the story of a family in 60/70s Minnesotta, who have to learn to pick up the pieces of their lives after the suicide of the father, Arthur. Told from three different perspectives, that of Claire the mother, Esau the oldest son and young Kate, the daughter, each narrative provides a glimpse in the effect of the tragedy. Hornbacher's great skill is her abilty to create a truly convincing 'voice' for each narrator, making the entire story seen totally genuine and realistic. Her characters are very complex and interesting as well, with no cliches and stereotypical devices being used.

I highly recommend this novel to anyone looking for a deeply touching, thought-provoking read.

This is an account of a dysfunctional family, although I almost hate to use that term despite the suicide of the father (I am not giving anything away) and the schizophrenia of one of the two children. There is love, strength and humor, and an unforgettable bond between the two siblings. In the beginning, the writing calls attention to itself, but Hornbacher is good enough to carry this off. Each of the main characters narrates sections of the book in their own voice, and even the several secondary characters come alive. The sections narrated by the schizophrenic child, Esau, are especially good. Toward the end, Hornbacher overdoes some small things: Esau scores 3 bingo's (7 letter words) in Scrabble in less than half the game, without using any esoteric words; Frank has a truly incredible library. This reinforces my suspicions that perhaps, in the account of the mental hospital and its patients, some degree of realism was sacrificed. That qualification aside, "The Center of Winter" credibly deals with mental illness, the terrible impact war has on some of its soldiers and a failed marriage. It is very well written, entertaining, and despite its subject matter, heartwarming.

Once I picked this book up and started reading I couldnt put it down. I was so upset when I realized it was 1 am and needed to get some sleep, but I finished the book promptly the next afternoon! I cried at the ending, not because of the ending, but because I was so sad the book was over! I want to start it all over again and lose myself in the beautiful writing...

Shades of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Center of Winter is the dysfunctional family's tale of survival. Two families, both cloaked in a shroud of unspeakable misery, lie at the heart of Marya Hornbacher's tale of broken homes, alcoholism, suicide, mental illness and the lingering effects the Vietnam War wreaks on the psyche. Together, those left to bear the brunt of the desolation forge an unlikely friendship that will endure a lifetime. Replete with multifaceted and skillfully developed characters as well as some of the most natural and believable dialogue I've encountered in ages, The Center of Winter is a shining gem, elevating it heads and tales above the popular cookie-cutter novel. As each layer of this richly built tale is lifted, contemplated and savored, Hornbacher's literary skill becomes all the more laudable.