Confinement [Mass Market Paperback]

Carrie Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

A refugee from Vienna and World War II, Arthur Henning now has a comfortable new life as a chauffeur for a banker and his family in the suburbs of New York. One day, he is ordered to drive Aggie, the daughter, to a home for unwed mothers. The family's decision to give the baby away shocks Arthur profoundly. He watched Agatha grow up; he cannot obey and leave her alone with her fate. As his bond with her develops, Arthur wakes from his own emotional slumber, and discovers-within his own confinement-freedom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Jewish refugee from Austria nurses a forbidden love for the much younger daughter of his American employer in this piercing, unusual novel by Brown (Rose's Garden; The Hatbox Baby) set in the suburban northeast in the years after WWII. Arthur Henning makes a hair-raising escape from Austria with his nine-year-old son, Toby, and later his wife, Anna, is killed in London in the Blitz. Haunted by memories of her and the trauma of Nazi persecution, Henning makes his way to the U.S., where he becomes the chauffeur and caretaker who tends to the estate of the Duvall family just outside New York. He finally channels his emotions into a deep love for the Duvall's precocious daughter, Agatha, after she becomes pregnant by an unknown suitor and is banished to a home for unwed mothers at the age of 17. Brown slowly develops their unusual friendship, rendering it in rich emotional detail. The edge in the plot comes from Henning's teenage son, Toby, who wants to see his father break away from the dysfunctional Duvall family and carve out a new life of his own. The final revelation regarding Toby's relationship with Agatha is fairly predictable, and some of the time shifts get a bit jittery when Brown dramatizes Henning's climactic separation from Agatha. But Brown's deft shaping of their unconventional love makes the novel haunting and memorable, and Henning's unusual decision to track the infant after Agatha gives birth adds some dark surprises down the stretch.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–When Arthur Henning and his young son, Toby, arrive at the Duvall family's New York country estate one wintry night in 1946, Arthur is resolutely ready to start his new life as a chauffeur. At the onset of the Holocaust, he and his family fled to London from Vienna, but his wife and their infant daughter were killed in the Blitz. Arthur and Toby befriend Agatha, the Duvalls' daughter; when she becomes pregnant, Mr. Duvall asks his chauffeur to drive her to a home for unwed mothers. Arthur refuses to desert her, and in this act of selflessness begins to break through his own confinement of memories and overwhelming obligations to the past and the present. Brown's exquisitely written novel is a complex exploration of the horror and aftermath of war, and also of love, redemption, and the peace one makes with oneself. The book is filled with vivid history, but without a trace of sentimentality. The writing is most lyrical when the novel turns to Arthur's thoughts and memories. His transformation causes him to realize how fragile and tenacious hope is. Readers will find this story compelling and powerful, and will care about the characters' fates.–Susanne Bardelson, Kitsap Regional Library, WA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Trade (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425200272
• ISBN-13: 978-0425200278
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,610,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best I've Read in a Long Time, March 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Confinement (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

Like most of Carrie Brown's work, this one radiates with beauty -- the beauty of language and of a great story. Where she has outdone herself is in the emotional effect of the novel. I frankly wasn't prepared to love this book, and indeed felt a little impatient in the first 1/2 chapter or so. But Brown masterfully interweaves not only the characters' lives and circumstances, but also all the different kinds and consequences of love and sacrifice. It's this trait that sets it apart.

There are no cheap thrills or manufactured emotions here... nothing contrived. Brown respects her readers, and it shows. Rather, this novel and its characters step quietly into the reader's life, as if they'd been waiting for our attention all along. They spin their wonderful story, and ask only for us to watch and listen. Believe me, it's enough.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "We are all alone in the end.", March 31, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Confinement (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

Longing, loss and suffering are the themes of Confinement, a gorgeously written and emotionally charged novel by Carrie Brown. I couldn't put this book down. This is a beautiful story, which brims over with passion and symbolism, as Brown melodiously recounts the complex and tortured life of Arthur Henning, a rather cloistered and resolute Jewish man - a refugee from Nazi Austria - who, together with his young son Toby, starts a new life as a chauffeur in America at a country estate, the home of the Duvall family. As his life in America settles, he watches Toby grow up along side the Duvalls' daughter Aggie. When Aggie falls pregnant, Mr. Duvall orders Arthur to drive her to Breakabeen, a home for unwed mothers. Arthur is shocked at the way her parents treat Aggie and when he learns of their decision to put the baby up for adoption he wants to save Agatha. Consequently, he begins to fall in love with her.

The confinement of the title is the confinement of the soul, as Arthur, a lonely man who is hiding from his past, seems unable to reclaim his life. His relationship with Aggie, however, releases him from his emotional slumber. For Arthur, Aggie is also a victim of persecution and confinement. Someone has taken advantage of her - her kindness, her humour and the decency that stood in her character. And his desire for her "becomes a boulder" which he cannot see around. Twenty years of his life in America seems to him a "sorry, shabby thing" and although he has been forced to reinvent himself, his sudden attraction to Aggie makes him question the type of man he has become.

His first winter in America is a private epilogue to the war, "a final, quite chapter in which nothing has happened and every loss will be felt over again." He remembers his wife Anna, and their baby, killed in the London blitz. And he is haunted by images of his friend, pianist and surgeon Dr Ornstein, sitting in his coffee shop just before he was brutally assaulted by the SS. He's obsessed by these ghostly images from the past, living a cloistered life in the United States, while also lamenting his Jewish faith, which "drifts life a river without banks to guide it", forever extinguished in the face of war.

Brown is a gifted stylist, whose prose is meticulously whittled and surefooted. Her powers of description are formidable - Arthur wants his own past to be erased, "to shiver and break up like water fleeing through his fingers." Confinement is narrated in a generous, patient, and intelligent voice, and the author almost presents the subject matter from the perspective of an insider, clear eyed and without sentimentality. This is a fine novel, about a man who feels he has lost everything, and who stands empty handed, but who, in the end achieves redemption. Mike Leonard March 04

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A painful transition, February 20, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Confinement (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)

Arthur Henning comes to America after fleeing his native country, but loses his wife and baby daughter to the London Blitz. Nevertheless he remains hopeful, carrying his young son, Toby, and a battered suitcase to the United States, where it has been arranged for him to work as a driver for the wealthy Duvall's.

Arthur's inner struggles are complicated by a recurring memory, an event he witnessed at the hands of the Nazi storm troopers, the brutal beating of a surgeon as bystanders watch, helpless to intervene. A lingering remnant of a disturbing past that tortures his mind, Arthur can never forget the nightmare of being Jewish in Hitler's Germany.

Scarred before he ever sets foot in his new country, Arthur is hopeful, living a precise and guarded life devoid of complications, his spirit humbled by the loss of joy. The years pass and Toby grows up in his father's shadow, witnesses to the excesses of the Duvall's, a prosperity they will never enjoy. Agatha, the Duvall's daughter, a year younger than Toby, is frequently left in Arthur's care when her mother is indisposed.

When a dismayed Arthur is ordered to deliver a pregnant Aggie to a home for unwed mothers, the humble Arthur is stunned by the Duvall's curt dismissal of their daughter; he makes it his personal mission to keep track of the baby, a boy, given up for adoption. Then he loses track of the adoptive family, thrown once more into despair, especially when Toby leaves home without a word. Years later, while driving through a familiar neighborhood, Arthur sees the child again, an experience that marks a new beginning, an opening of Arthur's long-stifled heart. Through the abiding friendship of Agatha, Arthur finds his way back to contentment.

This is a story born of the loss of country and kin, the loss of a child and finally a grandchild. Bridging Hitler's Europe and the American dream as lived from the outside, looking in, Arthur eventually disentangles from the manacles of his own history, finding redemption in the unknowable future, one defined by a newly awakened personal freedom. What might have been an engaging novel, crumbles under the burden of weighty prose. The author's use of description is better than average, but consistently overwrought, making it difficult to separate one element from the story, or one time frame from another. All in all, this is an ambitious effort by the author of The Hatbox Baby, another novel that never quite reaches its potential. Luan Gaines/2005.