MacDougal Street Ghosts: A Novel [Hardcover]

Hesper Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 23, 2005

Following her success as an Academy Award-nominated screenplay writer (CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD) and highly praised memoirist, Hesper Anderson pens an evocative novel that reinforces her reputation as a compelling storyteller. Long divorced and her children grown, Callie Epstein is packing her house to move to Northern California. Uncovering a box of long forgotten home movies, she sits back to watch her family's life unfold again before her eyes, reliving the best - and the worst - years of her life. Callie's memories take her to the centre of Greenwich Village, an enclave of green that's called the MacDougal Gardens. A block long, it can only be reached by the sixteen houses that border it. It's the late sixties, and women like Callie are discovering The Feminine Mystique and The Sexual Response of the Human Female. Feeling trapped in a passionless marriage, Callie begins an affair with a neighbour that will send her across the country on a journey of self-discovery and a search for real independence.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The collateral damage from a long-ago love affair resurfaces when Callie Hyde Epstein, now a successful, middle-aged Los Angeles screenwriter, stumbles on a forgotten cache of home movies, circa 1968, in this honest debut novel from screenwriter (Children of a Lesser God) and memoirist (South Mountain Road) Anderson. The films document her age of innocence (and its inevitable corruption) when as a young housewife she lived with her steady-if-repressed husband, Irwin, and their three children in one of the 16 Greenwich Village townhouses that border MacDougal Gardens. In all seasons, the children play in the private enclave surrounded by the houses, while their parents gather there to flirt with the counterculture and one another's spouses. Callie yields to temptation and frustration, and has an affair with her neighbor, Sam Messenger. Emboldened by her sexual awakening, she unloads her shocked husband, and in short order the fallout from her newfound freedom teaches her some hard truths. This unsentimental novel is a thoughtful re-examination of a fraught era, but it lacks emotional immediacy and suffers from being told in flashback. Its lack of suspense leaves only the painful witnessing of Callie's blunders as she moves blindly through selfishness to selfhood.
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From Booklist

Callie Epstein is on the move again, and the inevitable winnowing of her life's detritus prompts a trip down memory lane. Uncovering a box of old videotapes of her days as a young wife and mother in New York during the late 1960s, Callie recalls the nascent feelings of dissatisfaction undermining her safely comfortable marriage to Irwin and the accompanying seductive tremors of an unidentified longing. Craving freedom, she finds release in the arms of her neighbor, Sam, a sexy Broadway star and, Callie learns too late, an inveterate womanizer. Their affair explodes, then implodes. When Sam leaves, Callie falls apart--and so does Anderson's novel. Summing up the subsequent 30 years of Callie's life in mere pages, Anderson glosses over what should have been an equally dynamic phase of Callie's development. Still, in this cautious yet recognizable account of a woman in conflict, Anderson capably portrays the angst experienced by women who find that they indeed need to be careful of what they wish for. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (August 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074322924X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743229241
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,633,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars solid character study, September 22, 2005

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Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
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This review is from: MacDougal Street Ghosts: A Novel (Hardcover)

In her fifties, successful Hollywood screenwriter Callie Hyde Epstein is leaving her home in Studio City to a writer's village in the Northern California woods. As she packs, Callie thinks back to the years here as a single mom raising three children, all having left the nest. Still the shocker is the buried box of home movies from her married times in the late 1960s in Greenwich Village.

Callie starts to watch the movies, which focus on her then spouse Irwin and their three children as they lived in one of the townhouses that aligned MacDougal Gardens. Her children and other played together while their parents flirted with one another until a bored and tired Callie turned to neighbor Sam Messenger for lessons in sex. Tired of Irwin the ad exec she dumps him for Sam, but finds nothing to further foster inner harmony except mother's little helper pills prescribed by a string of uninvolved psychiatrists. That is until she takes the three kids to L.A.

Callie is an interesting lead character whose metamorphosis from stay at home having affair motherhood to confident employed single mom makes for a fine historical tale as the heroine looks back to the defining moments that changed her life. This gives the tale an autobiographical feel as fans see 1960s lower Manhattan mostly through Callie's prism. However, that also leads to the key other two characters in the triangular relationship that changes her seemingly one dimensional as the audience never gets to understand what motivates either Irwin or Sam. Still MACDOUGAL STREET GHOSTS is a solid character study that fans will enjoy reading.

Harriet Klausner