Customer Reviews

The Honeymoon: A Novel

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Justin Haythe is a subtle writer and is trying to do something here that wasn't obvious to me, not during my first reading. The narrator is slightly absent to the human dramas around him while focused on the details of nature--sky, lighting, the buildings and museaums; the heath and shifting weather--what he renders without cliches, in unusual details. That makes this novel different than one that is plot-driven.

The young narrator Gordy leaves a lot of the story out and then mixes up both time and place so that , for me at least, it required a second careful reading. Whose honeymoon this is isn't entirely clear for the book shows Gordy and Maureen, his mom, as much a couple as Gordy and Annie. That one incident (or make that two distinct ones) during the literal Venice honeymoon can determine the end of a marriage seems odd on first reading, too small moments that couldn't really break up two couples, the two mentioned above.

But then on re-reading, I saw that this tragedy was guaranteed due to the unique monther-son bond and so anything at all might have made Gordy's young marriage unravel. I give it 5 stars even though the beginning does not make clear where we are heading. The second half of this novel is just so beautifully and slyly written that I wish more people would take time to read it. Haythe's is a unique sensibility that in the right meditative mood gets easily under your skin (or did mine) and a tale that lingered long after the second reading.

Read it twice is my advice. Worth it, five stars.

I was interested in this book because it was written by a screenwriter and I wanted to see whether the two disciplines complimented each other or not.

On the whole I found the novel to be well structured and well paced, with excellent character observations and a brevity of prose that was refreshing.

However, I also felt that it was a novel that was written almost as a compositional task rather than out of any passion or human empathy. I didn't really feel any sympathy with the main protagonists and so the story I felt was slightly dull.

I can see why it was placed on the Booker Prize Long List in the UK, because for a debut it is very good, but it lacked any fresh or potent message apart from an obvious one, that of privileged people who act selfishly - which isn't a very original idea.