The Honeymoon: A Novel [Paperback]

Justin Haythe (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0802141838 | ISBN-13: 978-0802141835 | Publication Date: February 3, 2005

Justin's Haythe's remarkably assured debut, The Honeymoon, has been compared to the work of Ford Madox Ford and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in London and Venice at the end of the twentieth century, The Honeymoon follows a young man as he looks back on a series of events that have caused his life to unravel. Traveling through the capitals of Europe with his eccentric mother Maureen, American born Gordon Garraty has led a life of barren privilege. Only after marrying Annie, several years his senior and the daughter of a North London cab driver, does Gordon begin to emerge from the sphere of his mother's influence. Accompanied by Maureen and her Swiss fiancé, Annie and Gordon finally take a long-delayed honeymoon in Venice but find that the brilliance of the city seems to distort rather than illuminate. The story gathers a palpable intensity before a single act of absurd but devastating violence pricks their happy bubble and lays bare the emptiness at the core of their gilded lives. A deeply observant and beautifully crafted tale, gently funny and tender in equal parts, The Honeymoon marks the debut of a compelling new writer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The bond between mother and son becomes a stranglehold in Haythe's debut novel, an elaborate, unsettling character study that uses Venice as the setting for a strange honeymoon. Shy, sheltered Gordon Garraty spends most of his childhood traveling with his eccentric mother, Maureen, a dilettante who is constantly hopping around Europe to work on an art guide book that remains in a perpetual state of near-completion. Maureen's flamboyant dominance of her son leaves Gordon a bit of a blank slate, until he heads off to college in London and meets a sly, coy waitress named Annie who inexplicably breaks off her engagement to another man and agrees to marry Gordon after a disturbingly brief courtship. The unlikely union seems to surprise both bride and groom, and Gordon's rather tepid relationship with Annie comes completely unraveled when Maureen and her new fiancé, the over-tanned Gerhardt, invite the newlyweds on a trip to Venice. Haythe's prose is smooth and probing, and the narrative stakes rise when Annie hints at the possibility of incest between Maureen and Gordon after deciding to leave Venice early. But Haythe's focus on Maureen makes Gordon a shadowy, incomplete figure, and the novel's conclusion is more bizarre than climactic. Haythe shows promise as a stylist, but the combination of muddled climax and uneven character development hinders this otherwise impressive debut.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Gordon Garrety is an American living in London. He spent his childhood traveling about Europe with his mother, whom he always calls Maureen as she constructs a kind of grand tour of Europe out of her own notes and responses to art. The story spins backward as we learn about Gordon's father; his wife, Annie; and how bereft he is in his current life. It is Maureen who fills these pages, her "lilting flirtatiousness, the mock casualness, the wholly unjustified tone of expertise." It is Maureen who brings Annie and Gordon to Venice with her own new fiance on a belated honeymoon, and it is Maureen who threatens, in a spectacularly small-minded way, any hope Gordon may have at happiness. The writing is shapely and crafted; the characters glow, except for Gordon, which may be the point. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (February 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141838
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141835
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,575,265 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:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Relationships: a series of separations and reunifications", March 24, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Honeymoon: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a strange, bittersweet, and self-reflective novel. Lacking a readily recognizable plot line, the story is really a collection of vignettes structured around the first person point of view of Gordon Garrety, a rather disaffected and indifferent young man, who reminisces on his unusual relationship with Maureen, his volatile, and self-absorbed mother. When Gordon meets and marries Annie, a rather easy going working girl, Maureen and her irascible fiancée, Gerhardt invite them both to Venice on a honeymoon. What follows is a slowly paced, but rather intense account of their holiday in Venice, where an incident of sudden fury against Annie, puts Gordon at terrible odds with his Mother.

The strength of this novel is the way Haythe paints an indelible and detailed portrait of his characters, and it is obvious from the outset, that with all their faults he adores them. Rich, uncommitted and somewhat bored, his characters move through a world of privilege and stuffy entitlement. The narrative is told in the first person so attitudes and opinions are filtered through Gordon's point of view as he spends much of the novel ruminating on the type of woman that Maureen once was. Maureen is a difficult woman - dogmatic, self involved and self obsessed with "a willingness to distort the truth." Even though she "continues to hold and influence over him, she has already set some record of their life together."

Haythe's writing is subtle, fluid and descriptive, and like a painting he is intent on describing the intimate details of unconventional lives. Maureen is described as an aging beauty with "her skin taut on her thighs" and "beneath her white skin is a delicate design of blue veins like cobwebs beneath a frost." Her indubitable passion is art and painting, and Gordon watches her unquestioningly as tears role silently down her cheeks while she stands before Vermeer's Lady in a Red Hat, or Hopper's Sun in an Empty Room. There are some great moments in Honeymoon, particularly Gordon and Annie's sardonic wedding reception, which takes place in a London pub, and where family and guests seem strangely at odds with each other. And there are also some wonderful descriptions of Venice, set against the backdrop of the characters' inevitable maneuverings. This is an intuitive and subtle portrayal of family relationships bought to the edge, and is a wonderfully accomplished first novel. Mike Leonard March 04.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle portrait of relationships, June 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Honeymoon: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Honeymoon is insightful and beautifully written. It is told from the point of view of a young man who has barely just begun to figure out what he has observed and what he has lived. The effects of the narrator's past on his current situaton are revealed over the course of the book -- slowly, but with a quiet kind of deliberation that gives you time to really understand what he has gone through. The two relationships -- between the narrator and his mother and the narrator and his wife -- are examined with all their complications, and though it would be easy to assign blame, neither the narrator nor the reader can take the easy way out. A really lovely book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grace and subtlety, March 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Honeymoon: A Novel (Hardcover)

The book was the best impulse buy I've ever made. Rarely in life do risks pay off as splendidly as this one did. (...) There is a delicacy and a sublety in Haythe's writing that is quite wonderful.

Haythe has a real ability to recognize, and exploit, the gravity of a simple face to face encounter. There is nothing trivial about Haythe's writing. Every moment has a consequence that the characters must suffer through. He successfully recognizes and brings our attention to the minutae of the everyday, the small things that are often crushed by the larger, more memorable of life's moments. Haythe takes the time to closely look at what the rest of us only see.