Customer Reviews

Flesh and blood.

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Basically there are two kinds of novels, those that detail a specific event (a love affair, a tragedy, etc) and those that just ramble hither and yon telling no specific story. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of novels that ramble. "Flesh and Blood" is a ramble. However, I was totally enthralled from start to finish. This is the story of the Stassos family. It begins in 1939 and ends in the present day. This is the most intimate portrait of a family I've ever read. Each of the characters is fully realized, drawn with a clarity that insists on presenting each as unique and individual. Each possess the basic ambiguities of characte and personality that define us as human beings. No one is without flaw. No one is always right or always wrong. Families love and hate, exhilarate and exasperate, praise and disparage in equal measure. There is joy and there is sorrow. I felt transported as I read this novel. It is one of the best that I have ever read. I couldn't stand setting it down, and couldn't wait to get back to it when I had. What better recommendation for a novel but that it was so involving I felt I was a silent character with a vested interest in the everyday existence of this truly American family? Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours" and "A Home At the End of the World," is a modern master. READ THIS BOOK.

Michael Cunningham's "Flesh and Blood" is in some ways a unique book. It is not the choice of the subject matter, a gripping family saga that starts with a young Greek immigrant and his Italo-American sweetheart and ends in the mist of the distant future, some 30 years from now. It's not even the vivid characters that populate this saga, characters that are in most cases complex and interesting enough to become almost real in one's mind's eye. What makes this book very special is the narrator voice, a voice that lifts mundane events that happen to regular people to an upper sphere, where those events and protagonists acquire a magic quality that is unlike anything else I read. It is the use of a highly original metaphoric language that enevlops the narrative with something that is almost poetry that makes this book a joy to read. My feeling is that Cunningham (perhaps because of his young age) has a better access to younger characters than to older ones, and in some cases the older characters lose some of their vividness and become more flat. Otherwise - this is an excellent book.

An intense family drama which begins in 1935 and ends in 2035, the novel revolves around Constantine Stassos, a Greek who emigrates to the U.S. and eventually marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian girl who also wants to escape her home. He eventually fathers three children--Susan, who marries young to escape her father; Billy, who goes off to Harvard and an alternative lifestyle; and Zoe, who leaves for a hippie life in New York. When the children end up as parents themselves, their children's lives are also traced, as they, too, look for independence and a form of escape.

Filled with passion, as each character tries to define his/her own life, often using love and sex as their springboards to new lives, the characters reflect the eras in which they live. This is both a strength and limitation in the novel: a wonderful sense of universality pervades the struggles of the characters through the various generations, but their specific struggles are typical of their periods and easy to predict.

The characters themselves are well developed, but though they all possess unique qualities and eccentricities, they are also examples of cultural stereotypes. Constantine is an up-by-the-bootstraps success as a developer, but he is less successful as a husband. Mary tries to be the perfect wife and mother and becomes frustrated. Susan, a brittle striver in a tepid marriage, has one perfect child. Billy is gay, and Zoe dabbles in drugs and free love. Constantine's grandchildren are a perfect preppie and an interracial child living in a single parent household.

The most vivid character in the novel ironically, is not a member of the family. S/he is Cassandra, Zoe's transvestite guardian angel, a character so vibrant and so full of life that she dominates the scenes in which she appears and is almost solely responsible for any humor in the novel. (A scene in which Mary has a phone conversation with her, not knowing she is physically a male, is darkly hilarious, and Mary's first meeting with her is unforgettable.)

As the characters face discrimination, an almost-incestuous relationship, gay initiation, drugs, AIDS, divorce, illness, suicide, unplanned pregnancy, family rejection, and death, they also discover the forces which bring families together. Even those who "escape" find themselves inevitably connected to their family past. The search for love, the need for independence, the enduring connections of family, and the importance of memory enliven this generational saga. Written in beautiful prose and filled with perfect details, the novel revolves around honest characters expressing real emotion and learning real lessons. n Mary Whipple

"Flesh and Blood" is the saga of three generations of the Stassos family. Mary and Constantine are first generation immigrants. Italian and Greek respectively. They meet as teenagers and marry during the 1950's. Their marriage yields three children, Susan, Billy and Zoe. Constantine focuses on obtaining wealth and possessing things, believing that wealth would somehow elevate his status as an American and remove the stigma of his poor Greek upbringing. Mary sees their marriage as a means of escape from her family only to discover that she's married a brut with a temper who physically and emotionally terrorizes his family.

Each child learns to survive the family by finding their own escape. Susan tries to emulate what she thinks her mother is missing - thing that should prevent her father's fits of anger. In doing so, Susan takes on the responsibility of comforting her father, explaining him and requesting her siblings' patience with him. Her love for her father, and her desire to please him, prove to be a dangerous emotional combination. Billy's relationship with their father is tumultuous from the start. As a child whose sensibilities are not masculine enough for what Constantine desires in a son, Billy was often on the receiving end of the physical and verbal eruptions of his father. With a defiance as strong as his father's temper, Billy managed to survive the household and emerge as Will, a Harvard educated teacher who is accepting of his sexuality but never finds any love for his father. Zoe is the youngest child who spends the majority of her life trying to disappear. As an adult, she looses herself in drugs and chemically induced freedom until she becomes pregnant and discovers that she has reason to live.

These are the trimmings of the story; the meat is in how Cunningham manages to pull it together. The characters are intricately imagined, the prose flawlessly scripted. The author is able to draw out the humanity of each character ways that allow you to love, hate and empathize with them. Cunningham is a wonderful talent. He can be counted on to deliver stories that are powerfully emotive and expertly imagined. An excellent read.

Training his perceptive eye on one family, Cunningham explores contemporary - and timeless - issues of American culture in a voice that combines emotional power with sensitive portrayals of character.

Structured chronologically by year, the novel is organized in sharply etched vignettes, from which patterns of personality emerge. It opens in 1935 with a vivid glimpse of Constantine's hardscrabble life as the son of a Greek peasant farmer, then jumps to 1949, with Constantine, the young immigrant, in love with Mary. "He had a second life now, inside her head. He worried, almost every moment, that she would realize her mistake."

By Easter 1958, Mary, the working class girl from Newark, has three children. Striving for perfection in a cake shaped like a bunny, she is harried by the demands of her family and too little money. When their son, Billy, wakes while she and Constantine are filling Easter baskets, spoiling the surprise of them, Constantine loses his temper. "He might have conquered his own anger if Billy had remained defiant. But Billy began to cry and without quite having decided to, Constantine was shaking him....." The scene grows, Mary frantic, throwing herself over Billy. "Constantine was in a passion now, a crackling white glory. Delirious, he knocked the baskets off the table. Jelly beans sprayed like stones against the walls. Chocolate lambs broke on the floor, plastic eggs cracked open and spilled out the trinkets Mary had hidden inside. He started to ram his fist into the cake."

But instead of destroying the cake, Constantine falls into a passion of regret, begging forgiveness from his son and wife. "She neither welcomed nor recoiled from his touch."

This is a pattern set for life; Mary striving for perfection in the appearance of things, Constantine raging at the imperfections of his wife, his son, the life he had envisioned for himself in 1949.

And when Constantine stikes it rich, comparatively, by becoming partners with a Greek contractor building tract homes, the money solves nothing. Mary worries about fitting in in affluent suburbia; her eyes are opened to new horrors of failure.

Billy, especially, is a disappointment to his father. Brooding, effeminate, Billy grows increasingly bitter and isolated. After a particularly violent scene, the teenager Billy remarks to his older sister, Susan, " 'Have you noticed how he never breaks stuff?' "

Only Susan seems to have a handle on life. She takes after her mother, follows the rules, fits in with the cheerleaders and football players, has a shot at becoming Homecoming Queen. She's the peacemaker and on the night Billy vows to someday kill his father she goes to Constantine with soothing words and, finally, feeling the power sexuality can bring her, a most undaughterly kiss.

Zoe, the youngest, is an unknown. There's something wild and feral about her but only Zoe seems to stay completely clear of domestic storms.

Reeling from the loss of the Homecoming Queen crown, seeing herself clearly branded as Italian-Greek interloper, Susan decides on impulse to marry Todd, her insider boyfriend, and thereby escape her father's continuing clandestine "kisses and hugs." This is one of the book's few jarring notes. Susan, accepted at college, ambitious and vaguely contemptuous of the boyfriend who wants nothing more than to continue the life he's always known, has other means of escape. Instead she lets her mother organize an elaborate suburban ritual.

"The wedding was flawless, except for the guests." Mary regards Constantine's colleagues balefully. Subject to vague sharp stabs of anger, Mary takes a pill and concentrates on her daughter. "It seemed that Susan had gone to another country, where all the girls were effortlessly thin and beautiful and all the boys had futures sturdy as suspension bridges....This one, at least, was safe." So little do parents know their children.

Zoe slips into a drifting life in New York City where her best friend is a drag queen and her days are taken up with sex and drugs. She conceives a child by a black man who never knows of the pregnancy - the child remains an oddity to his grandparents who dote on Susan's boy, Ben - a rugged docile child whose inner life is a turmoil of secrets. Ironically, Ben's biggest secret is his burgeoning homosexuality, the same tendency Constantine spent his youth trying to beat out of Billy.

Billy seizes his independence from family the minute he goes off to Harvard as an undergraduate. He works at it, changing his name to Will, living in squalor, perpetuating several non-violent but nonetheless seering cruelties upon his parents. But he makes a life for himself, teaching, living quietly in Boston's gay community, eventually falling in love and coming to terms with some of his demons.

The episodic structure of the novel lends itself to drama and melodrama. But Cunningham's subtle portrayal of character imbues each scene with delicacy of feeling. Although people often react to the buttons others deliberately push, Cunningham explores the underlying complexities. In this way he successfully puts individual faces on such broad issues as AIDS, homosexuality, family violence, adultery, suburban posturing and, through it all, intergenerational misunderstanding. Without being heavy-handed about it, Cunningham underlines the unchangeable constant - one person can never completely see into the heart and soul of another.

"Flesh and Blood" is a marvelous work, moving, thought-provoking and wholly absorbing.

Twenty-four hours after finishing FLESH AND BLOOD, my goosebumps are only now subsiding. It's rare to read a novel with multiple generations where each character sticks in your mind -- often authors lose their readers when they switch to the next generation, but Cunningham keeps the older generation alive in our minds and on the pages as he lets us get to know the "kids." Every relationship is fully realized, and there are certainly a wide variety of relationships in this satisfying book! Poetic and oh-so-real. People don't have major epiphanies right and left, Hollywood-style. They change very slowly over a long time. Cunningham is a compassionate chronicler of human frailty.

Michael Cunningham's "Flesh and Blood," is one of the best novels I've read so far this year.

Constantine Stassos is a Greek immigrant with ambition, drive and a fierce temper. His wife Mary works hard to maintain the ideal or at least the illusion of perfection in her family. Constantine's three children are each touched, destroyed, or changed by their parents' behavior, especially their father's.

Cunningham's characterization is brilliant. Every thought, every action, every belief held by the people in "Flesh and Blood" rings true and results in a stunning display of cause and effect.

Susan, the eldest daughter is forever changed by her father's lack of boundaries, and Zoe, the youngest, the one named for Constantine's Greek heritage, is essentially ignored until the other two children have grown up and moved away from home. Constantine shows a unique tenderness to this wild child as they work together in the garden.

There's something different about Billy, Constantine's only son, and that fact haunts Constantine, a feeling left unsaid-at least in the verbal sense-but always there between them nonetheless. Here's an excerpt:

"When Constantine hit him he felt he was obliterating a weakness in the house. He was cauterizing a wound. The back of his hand struck Billy's jaw hard, scraped across his teeth with a cleansing burn. He heard Mary's scream from a distance. Billy's head snapped back and Constantine hit him again, this time with the heel of his hand, a smack solid and sure as a hammer driving a nail deep into pine."

The novel opens with a scene in which Constantine as a young boy works hard to make things grow, going so far as to carry bits of rich soil in his mouth so that he may drop it onto his poorly soiled plot of a garden. The image of the garden shows up again when he and his daughter Zoe work to produce beautiful vegetables, loaded with hidden caustic pesticides.

"She raised the tomato to her mouth, and Constantine had an urge to yell, `Don't it's poisoned.' Which was ridiculous. It was no more poisoned than most of what people ate, and probably less. But as he watched her bite into the tomato, a chill shot through his heart."

A stunning metaphor for the family affected by Constantine's devotion and poisonous weaknesses.

Although I loved The Hours, I approached this book - written several years earlier - with modest expectations. Twenty pages in, I realized I'd stumbled upon one of those rare books that engages the reader on several different levels: a deeply moving saga held aloft by beautiful writing. This book offers a resonant, complex, and often painful reverie on the mysteries of identity, what is passed down from one generation to the next through blood and spirit.

I really don't have anything new to add, since the other reviewers have done that for me, but here I am, anyway.

I personally enjoyed this book, and at times, I was upset by the choices some characters in this book made. I was yelling: "How could you do that? I hate you!" But that passed, and soon I saw (or at least tried to see) why they would do such things. This is when I realized how good this book really is. I was being angry at fictional characters! This showed me that the author had well-developed characters and a story that kept the reader interested. (Which wasn't a surprise, since I read his other two books.)

Recommended if you get lost in chacarcter-driven novels about the struggles of life.

-Ater

This is an absolutely amazing novel by an amazing author. It follows a family that becomes torn and battered over the years but always manages to stay strong and find their way through. It was a very long novel, but I finished it in a matter of days because I simply could not put it down. Cunningham presents the Stassos family to you so vividly and dramatically that you are practically there to experience every heartache and tear of joy with them. You deeply care and understand the characters because you have observed them in their everyday lives and you feel their pain as if you knew them personally. This is an amazing book and definitely worth a read.