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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is one of the best books I've ever read!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lucy Crown (Paperback)
This is one of the best books I have ever read. It is a true story of love and loss. It is hard to believe a man wrote this story. Lucy Crown makes a terrible mistake that alters her entire life. Somehow she finds the strenght to deal with her pain. You can feel Lucy Crown. This is one of the few books I have read many times. Excellent summer reading
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best...,
By Brad Galvin (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lucy Crown (Paperback)
More than anything else, this book was Irwin Shaw's attempt at revealing the fragility of the goodness of good people, and for exploring the futility of making the distinction. One of the best books I have read. Definitely recommended.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Paging Douglas Sirk,
By
This review is from: Lucy Crown (Paperback)
A woman married just long enough to feel unappreciated finds herself in the arms of another man. It's an old story, but Irwin Shaw does some brilliant things with it in his immersive if somewhat melodramatic novel "Lucy Crown."Reading "Lucy Crown" is like stepping through a time portal to the time of its 1956 publication. Well-known then yet forgotten today, it depicts an era where people dressed for cocktails, where casual get-togethers were called "smokers," where a man could openly fret about his son spending so much time with his mother that he'll wind up "in the ballet." People give big speeches as to what it's all about. This is the sort of novel that Douglas Sirk no doubt would have directed the movie adaptation of had Shaw not been blacklisted at the time. It's easy to point out how the novel runs afoul of modern sensibilities. Yet despite a major plot point halfway in that seems too fantastically cruel to be real, "Lucy Crown" grabs you and doesn't let go. Drawn in amid the summer splendor of a Vermont cottage to the novel's three central characters, the title character, her husband, and her son, it's easy to get lulled and comfortable by Shaw's low-key descriptive fluidity, his way of putting you inside their skins. Then boom, things change for no apparent reason except boredom and frustration, and choices are made with seemingly irrevocable results. Yes, it's all a bit much to swallow at times, yet however appalling the behavior of these characters, you want to see how they turn out. I think feminists would have a field day with this book, alternately braining and celebrating Shaw's take on the American woman circa 1956. "Adultery is the upper-middle-class American woman's form of self-expression," as one character puts it, and indeed it seems a common enough thing as Shaw writes about it. Marriage is for fools, he seems to say, yet women who struggle for a more independent course are poised to do others a lot of damage while helping themselves hardly at all. One of the more interesting elements of the novel is the way it draws on the characters' ennui even as it engages the reader. We watch the boy grow from a sickly innocent into jaded outsider who can scarcely stand to be in the same room with someone expressing honest emotion. Like with all the characters, you want to yell at him to get over himself, but Shaw lays enough groundwork for you to accept his depiction as an honest one. There are some searing moments in this book, and some clever ones. The latter includes a first chapter that features a beautiful older woman eyeing a younger man at a Paris bar, all fed through the sensibilities of a jaundiced patron we never meet again. It's a sort of short story in itself, with a perfect capper of a conclusion, the type Shaw was famous for even more than his fairly successful novels. Yet this opener isn't a stand-alone gem; it sets the rest of the novel in motion. Reading the first chapter is like eating that first potato chip: Stop there if you dare. Ultimately the book loses a bit of steam before winding things up with a fairly pat ending. But the ride is a memorable one, and from about page 100 to 250 you won't read many books faster than this. Written before the age of irony, Shaw isn't afraid of the catharsis or the big emotional revelation. This could have made "Lucy Crown" a silly period piece, but instead the courage of its convictions, along with its author's talent and vision, carry it through.
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