Customer Reviews

Either Side of Winter

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In four seasonal, connected stories, Markovitz dissects the internal lives of his four protagonists, connected by the threads of family, occupation and acquaintance, revealing the subtleties of complicated father-daughter relationships and the way people maneuver around private prejudices and selfish mistakes. Amy Bostick ("Fall") is in New York for a teaching position after four years of college; she feels that her father is sending her out to live the life he failed to experience; only forty-seven, he has begun a slide into middle age, with false teeth, thinning hair and a growing paunch. As her younger brother achieves his own belated successes, Amy senses her pride of place slipping, her life a footnote rather than the center of attention. When her family comes to New York for Thanksgiving, Amy anticipates sharing the old with the new, only to learn that expectations breed regret.

When Howard Peasbody ("Winter") discovers he has a daughter by a woman from years before, he is astounded. Thoroughly gay, his younger lover ensconced at home, Howard thought only to meet this old flame and reminisce. As she speaks, Howard reassesses his response to her news, considering how he has manipulated facts to fit his take on the world, creating a comfort zone that is possibly unrealistic, "it occurred to him once more that he might be looking through a distorted lens". Practicing "the indifference of control", Howard reasserts his will, hoping to retreat from this potential vulnerability. His self-deception conceals an astonishing amount of self-destruction, his cold heart seeping like ice to separate him from his feelings.

Stuart Englander ("Spring"), another teacher, has reached a plateau where everything is hopelessly banal but for his students, one in particular. Fascinated by the brown-haired Rachel Kranz, Stuart's early morning imagination is fixated involuntarily on her, his wife's bulk sleeping beside him. The marriage, retaining little animation, balances on intuition: "Childlessness had kept them childish". Occasional tears reduce Stuart to what is left of his "mineral bitterness", awakened by spring only to be confronted by his own failures. "Summer" features Rachel Kranz, the object of Stuart's desire, who has her own problems, caught in her parents' divorce, forming a self image that collapses with each new doubt. Coming to terms with a loss that will alter everything familiar, albeit troubling or distasteful, Rachel is desperate for comfort before being thrust into an indifferent world.

Markovitz's characters are full of the slight, brittle judgments we all make but keep to ourselves and it is this poignancy that resonates through the stories, each season a revelation. Precisely drawn, revealing the barest slices of their lives, these people are exposed to the marrow, blindsided by their flaws: Given the choice "he wouldn't have chosen her. So this was the stuff he was made of." While these characters are, for the most part, unlikable, they remain utterly fascinating, thanks to the author's talent for shaping their universally human flaws. Grounded in academia, the protagonists are both victims and beneficiaries of their intellects, yearning and self-defeating, on the cusp of change but beyond ambitious gestures. Luan Gaines/ 2005.

It is easy to assign quite a few positive literary judgements to Markovits' novel: the text is carefully constructed, the author is well-read, the images are well-chosen and so on. Still, he doesn't manage to captivate neither the reader nor his imagination. The points Markovits has to make are not trivial, but they aren't new either. As a consequence, the whole text appears to be a literary "etude" rather than a work of art.
The characters are passed on from chapter to chapter - each a short story in itself. The spotlights from each form the "whole picture" in the end. But due to the novel's fine but rather artificial construction, the detail spent on character description is finally lost: all is artifice without live.
Through Markovits' need for controlling his characters as well as his style, the whole text seems strangely out-of-date, as if he had written it along the rules set down in a creative-writing-guide from the fifties.

This is not a novel (or series of four stories) for the casual reader. I cannot add more about the content of the novel than what is so well stated in the first review (above). But I would like to make a suggestion to the reader who might find the first pages difficult to get into. Read it aloud to catch the subtle syntax. Don't let Mr. Markovits' elaborated sentences put you off until you tune your ear to the artistry of his brilliant prose. These are brilliantly conceived characters, delicately handled.

This novel--really a series of interlinking short stories--shows both why we keep searching for happiness and how difficult it is to achieve. The guy in the Times called it Flaubertian, and for once, I don't think the term was used irresponsibly. Markovits has a lyric eye for the everyday detail that brings description to life, making Fathers and Daughters every bit as thrilling as more obviously plot-driven books.

This book is titled "Either Side of Winter" in some other countries.

In this bittersweet tale of shrewd self defense, daughters must deal with illusive fatherly love, spouses must deal with the betrayal of their loved ones, and children must cope with the death of those that are most dear to them. In Fathers and Daughters, children suffer the consequences of their parents' mismatched and inequitable love, and mothers and fathers make selfish judgments about their lives and about their children.

Structured around the four seasons, Fathers and Daughters contains four beautifully written and loosely connected stories that explore the boundaries of love, betrayal, commitment, and forgiveness. Cautionary and intimate, author Benjamin Markovits uses the collegiate setting, the civilized veneer of academia to weave an absolutely lovely tale of domestic life, involving danger, of secrets kept and revealed, and of desire and it's unforeseen consequences.

Spring centers on Amy Bostik. Amy has just moved to New York from suburban New Jersey, a self-confessed "daddy's girl," she has just landed a job at a prestigious college and his anxious to make a good impression. Amy has also started dating Charles, a wealthy young lawyer at a prestigious firm in Manhattan, a gentleman of "aristocratic affability."

Amy is initially swept away be the young man's charm, but the arrival of her family for Thanksgiving unleashes some new issues for her and she's torn between her loyalty for Charles and her love for her father, and her family. Amy has been given the preferences of love, the natural choice of affections, the darling of hearts, and the inheritor of her parents' dreams. This blessing forces her to ultimately question her budding love for Charles, because what counts for the family, what held it together runs" deeper than happiness."

Meanwhile, it has become winter and Howard Peasbody, a teacher at Amy's college, is terribly unhappy. Whilst he begins to question his long-term relationship with Tomas, his German boyfriend, a woman suddenly visits him from the past. Apparently, he once fathered a child. Meeting his now grown daughter forces him not only to confront Tomas, but also to reevaluate his place in the world.

With his air of patient irony, Howard has come to the point he can no longer hide the fact of his unhappiness, the profound depth of it. Perhaps then, the discovery of his new family might give him a second chance to make something other than solitude out of his life, living as he has "so deeply of his memories."

Stuart Englander is Howard's teaching colleague. When Stuart learns that a friend has run off with a student of his, he also begins to question his own stultifying marriage, "a marriage that depended not only on shared tastes but on their ability to guess the discrepancies." Stuart starts to fantasize about Rachel Kranz, an attractive and wealthy young girl who is currently a student in his class.

Spring seems to have awakened dormant desires within Stuart, and although Rachel is not that talented and seems to be struggling, the ageing professor steadily becomes more besotted with her. Stuart confesses that he has lived most of his life in books, "though he for his part had been content to stop short at their pages." Rachel's point of view is presented in summer; she's just found out that her father is dying, and now she must navigate the murky waters of her bickering parents. She eventually comes to Stuart, using her stunning beauty to wile him, but also to get him to act as a type of confessional.

All the characters are bound by their past, and the choices they have made. Family bonds are important, fathers and daughters often relying on other people to supply them with the usual human furniture - anger and love. Amy is ultimately ambivalent about Charles, and hopes she hasn't fractured her relationship with her dad; Howard has learned to break the bonds of his relationship with Tomas and has been forced to grow up; and Stuart has learned to feel desire again, whilst also trying to keep his love for his wife intact; Rachel, who makes up this odd quartet, she herself with the sickly father and a self-obsessed mother, has perhaps ultimately become a seeker of truth.

Hughes has written a poignant and powerful tale, full of richly drawn characters, mired in vanity, hunger, and grief. He exposes the inner lives of his characters with all their flaws and failings, "a great score of emotional fuel, burning inward and building up warmth." Marvovit's prose is complex, insightful, and deeply empathetic, and every decision that the author makes, shows his great command of the fictional art, a deep personal intuitiveness and contemplation. Mike Leonard January 06.

The book isn't exclusively about fathers and daughters, but it's a major theme. Amy Bostick is a "daddy's girl" about to leave him and move to NYC to start a teacher's job. He comes to the city to visit her for Thanksgiving and meets her new boyfriend, Charles Conway, the rich son of a lawyer. They hit it off and play golf together, yet lose money to a man named Reuben Kranz, the partner of Conway's father, who will reappear later with his own daughter, Rachel, a 17-year-old beauty, caught in her parents' divorce and then faced with her father's death from a brain tumor. Her high school English teacher, Stuart Englander, falls in love with her, reminiscing about his first love with a girl her age and trying to rekindle it, with the tacit support of his barren wife. In the middle is the story of Howard Peasbody, another teacher, who receives a letter from his college girl friend who disappeared and had a child -- his, as it turns out. Peasbody is a gay man who lives with his lover, a young German, and once he meets his daughter, Francesca, he is so distraught that he breaks off relations with everyone. The stories of all these characters overlap, with Francesca and Rachel developing a friendship that is soldified over conversation about their fathers -- Rachel's is dying and Francesca's abandons her. There is a bittersweet quality to all the stories, they are tender and knowing with a keen understanding of family love, sexual desire and loss.