Customer Reviews

My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Perhaps the most entertaining book that I have ever read. Sarah Payne Stuart makes me howl and a second later makes me thank God that I've got both oars in the water. God Bless You SPS.

Sarah Stuart has done a remarkable job of limning the WASP world of Robert Lowell's family - and her own. She is cheerfully honest, perceptive and quite amazingly intelligent. The picture she draws lingers with the reader long after the book has been put down. Her portrait of Lowell is refreshingly free from the amateur Freudian analysis so tiresomely characteristic of many memoirs.

Ms. Stuart writes engagingly and at first I thought this history might include some fresh insight into Boston Brahmin culture. Somewhere in the middle of the book I began skimming, avoiding timeworn descriptions of WASP snobbery and emotional coldness. The one area in which the story might have added some depth, generations of psychiatric hospitalizations, is treated as a tour guide of hospitals for the rich. This book will only interest those completely unfamiliar New England WASP culture.

This is a wonderful book -- delightfully well crafted and inspiring. It has less to do with Robert Lowell than the title and other reviews imply, but so what. The rest of the author's family is just as interesting if not more so. She deals in a flinty steadfast New England way with madness and eccentiricity and writes with wit and charm, leaping effortlessly from Plymouth Rock to the 1980's. She has the very rare gift of being ironic and insightful about herself and her growing up without degenerating into self-pity. An example from 1967: "Aunt Sarah talked of sending me to Miss Porter's [finishing school], just as she talked about the coming-out party she was going to given me in the garden in Manchester (but which I declined because of the bombing of Vietnam, a connection that was a bit clearer to me then)." If you enjoy crystal clear prose, history and getting to know some delightful characters, this one's for you.

"From a sometimes painful family history, Sarah Payne Stuart has created a poignant, funny and ultimately triumphant memoir filled with great warmth and wisdom. Written in a refreshing, unforgettable voice which never falters nor sentimentalizes, MY FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED is a thoroughly terrific book." --Doris Keans Goodwin

Reading "My Cousin Once Removed" was like going home. Do other people besides my family name their cottages after their children? Ours was Tomberher, and it still embarrasses me to say it.

I perceived backbone and stoicism in the author. She will become a fine, undomnible Boston matron herself someday. These are people that know how to Pull-Up-Your-Socks. No one ever seems to give up. I amend that, the family will not *allow* anyone to give up. Poor Robert Lowell. His poetry must have kept him alive such as it was. The author makes an excellent point when she expresses amazement that he "lasted until he was 60." He seemed so gentle to be so mad. I couldn't resist smiling when I noted that only the Lowells would unfailingly be "God" in their deluded or "manic" states; other manic depressives might be Sam Spade, Peter Pan, or Theodore Roosevelt; but the Lowells went for the whole enchillada. My only complaint is the author neatly sidesteps giving the reader anything but broad outlines of what she was up to when the maelstorm whirled about her. Most younger writers cannot get out of the way; you are buried under their angst, but Ms. Stuart quotes her brothers to give us an idea what is going on in her generation. She's oddly elusive. I think she uses her fine sense of humor to deflect us from coming to close.

I'm going back to reread Robert Lowell. That's my idea of a successful book, one that sends you on a quest for further knowledge.

With fresh black humor and a no nonsense style, Sarah Payne Stuart has written a book of family suffering that gives a vivid understanding of the terrors and fall out of mental illness. She also describes with deft strokes what monsters people are, who lack imagination, and arrange to be insulated from pain by self-regard and a great deal of money.

I took this book up as a lover of biography rather than of poetry; I'll have to take the other reviewer's word for it that it isn't satisfying to poetry lovers, but it certainly didn't satisfy me. In some ways Stuart is a clumsy, or at least not fluid, writer. More to the point, I felt a little misled, as the book is only nominally about Robert Lowell, and the rest of the family, while interesting Victorian characters, don't merit a book's exploration.

If you enjoyed My First Cousin Once Removed by Sarah Payne Stuart, the next book you read will have to be Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt.

This is not a book for anyone interested in Robert Lowell or his poetry. This is a maudlin account of one woman's inability to recognize or empathize with the inner life of her famous relative, and her valiant attempts to profit by her own shortcomings. In short, mere gossip. Eileen Simpson's "poets in Their Youth" is much more interesting, and Richard Tillinghast's "Robert Lowell's Life and Work" is far more insightful, for those who care about Lowell's poetry. But as for those who don't care about Lowell's poetry, well, all I can say is, why bother to read a book by someone whose only claim on your attention is that she's Lowell's distant cousin?