The Honeymoon: A Novel [Hardcover]

Justin Haythe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 9, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1845056701 | ISBN-13: 978-1845056704

In his debut novel, The Honeymoon, Haythe delivers a deeply observant and nuanced tale, set in London and Venice at the end of the twentieth century, in which a young man looks back on a series of events that have caused his life to unravel. Until the age of twenty-one, American-born Gordon Garrety hasn't reflected much on his unusual and peripatetic childhood, spent largely as the traveling companion of his eccentric mother, Maureen. Only when Gordon meets Annie, several years his senior, does he begin to emerge from the sphere of his mother's influence. The first time they meet, Gordon and Annie make love in a park and soon after are married. Over the course of a year in London, Gordon and Annie construct for themselves an idea of married life, into which Maureen's restless spirit occasionally intrudes. Accompanied by Maureen and her bibulous Swiss fiance, Gerhardt, Annie and Gordon finally take their long-delayed honeymoon to Venice, where they are instantly seduced by the world's most unlikely city. Beautifully crafted, gently funny, and genuinely surprising, Justin Haythe's remarkably assured debut will astound readers with its dead-on depiction of the dangers of desultory and privileged lives.

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.

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (February 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1845056701
• ISBN-13: 978-1845056704
• ASIN: 0871139146
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,572,967 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.