A painter with an adolescent child, Claire Neale struggles through abortion, impending divorce, single-parenting, the discovery of new love--elements of a modern epic that begins in the middle and arrives at possibility. Under the weight of misfortune, Claire can'st help studying her past. She wants to create a lighter, more open future. Trying to find a place for herself and her daughter, Ruth, Claire stubbornly refuses to succumb to her own mother'ss oppressive shelter on Fire Island. Through the odyssey of Claire'ss search and despair comes Pat O'sConner, a gallery owner with businesses in Manhattan and Sag Harbor. For Claire and Pat, sexual and artistic desire blend to create a courtship both magnetic and edgy, angst-ridden and arousing.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Jean Harris is a novelist who lives in Long Island City, New York. Her first novel, Shadowzone appeared in 1997. It was published by Libra Press and launched in Bucharest, Romania by Professor Romul Munteanu. An English Professor and essayist, Harris has written literary criticism as well as texts on psychology and the origin and development of literary creativity.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intimacies Woven In Words,
By Anna Thesia "Anna Thesia" (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Diffidence (Paperback)
Through images and language, Diffidence captures the unspoken dynamics in relationships of all varieties. The story is subtle and entrancing, bringing the reader into a world of intimacies, regret, and the relief of still having the potential of a future. Great book to take you out of your own world and into an equally compelling world of another.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Real Literature,
This review is from: Diffidence (Paperback)
If you tired of the thriller sex, overblown relationships in fiction, leading only to a killed time and improved sales then try DIFFIDENCE by Jean Harris. It is a real literature with the development of characters, mother-daughter-grandmother-close friends lines, all intimate, tense, painful like in real life. Jean Harris is a master of dialogue and skillful in rendering the emotion of relationship, always leaving something closed, having the reader not to turn pages fast, but to think, try it him/herself. Author's Fire Island landscapes and scenes smell of salt, wet canvas, abandoned piers and subconcsious human isolation, something we are all afraid of and still carry on through our entire lifes. At times Harris' prose moves confidently into the realm of poetic deliverance:
"The act of telling always failed. It began as a telephone call at night, a street corner conversation, impulses dislocated into wires in the dark" This novel is a poem you'd like to read slowly, slowly opening layer after layer of the emotional meaning underneath the strata of a real prose style. Andrew Profer
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taut, smart and fun novel,
This review is from: Diffidence (Paperback)
"Diffidence" is a taut, smart and fun novel; a lesson in the psychology of the couple -- the readers interested in the psychology of an artist-in-love, artist-as-mother, artist-as-daughter-of-a-woman-fond-of-machinations, or artist-as-a-lesson in how to reinvent yourself, will find here stuff aplenty.
The protagonists of this beautiful novel linger in your memory long after you put the book down. At a time when so many published novels are thinly veiled bloated stories that lack the respiration of a real novel, it is refreshing to read this one. This is not an enlarged story -- one in which the writer just added layer after layer of verbal and descriptive padding interspersed with psychobabble; this is constructed from the first beam as a novel and you regret when it's over. Mircea Sandulescu, author of "Escapes and Ashes."
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Yes: happy to be almost alone, Claire was about to read when the telephone rang. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Fire Island, New York, Vatican Museum New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Yes: happy to be almost alone, Claire was about to read when the telephone rang. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Fire Island, New York, Vatican Museum New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 7
books:
See all 7 books this book cites
- See What You Think: Critical Essays for the Next Avant Garde by David Rosenberg in Back Matter
- Sartor Resartus (Oxford World's Classics) by Thomas Carlyle on page 144
- Long Island (America and Her People) by Bill Harris in Back Matter
- The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud on page 13
- Our Father by Pastor Deana Gordon in Back Matter
See all 7 books this book cites
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