Amazon.com: Never Say Good-bye (9780394571553): Gloria Vanderbilt: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 1989

A novel about the interconected lives of four women living in New York in the mid-1980's over the course of a year. Each is from a very different background.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } A novel about the interconected lives of four women living in New York in the mid-1980's over the course of a year. Each is from a very different background.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vanderbilt follows her memoirs ( Once Upon a Time and Black Knight, White Knight ) with this confusing fictional debut that sketches four contemporary women in a sophisticated New York City-scape. Best defined is Jess, manager of an art gallery, who is engaged in an anguished sporadic love affair with Mac, a married TV reporter. Mac's canny wife, Billie Mae, once a dirt-poor country girl, refuses to give up her husband or his contacts, which advance her career as an artists' agent. Jane, an English comic actress, shares her sadistic lover Grafton with an American artist named Garnet, whose most distinguishing feature is a striking resemblance to Jess's long-missing mother, Dolores. The blurred voices and constant chopping and switching among subplots lead to a numbingly cryptic effect. The women desultorily revolve around one another until a few blows of stunning cruelty are dealt and those who are missing return. 35,000 first printing.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Four women, connected only by mutual bedmates, provide alternate voices in Vanderbilt's first novel. (She chronicled her life in Once Upon a Time and Black Knight, White Knight) . Elegant widowed Manhattan art gallery owner Jessica Weatherbee, who has suffered devastating personal losses with more to come, ponders her future with long-time lover, married TV journalist Mac Hollis. Mac's wife Billie speaks of her midwestern roots and jealously guarded marriage, while painter Garnet Blackburn and actress Jane Esmond share the kinky sex (hints of bondage and bruising) of artist Grafton Davis, who has bedded Jess and will work with Billie. Interspersed are diaries of Dolores Willis, Jess's mother who vanished some 50 years earlier and has been held in a Russian sanitarium. What might aspire to be a novel about love and loss is more about lifestyles of the rich and famous, with a dash of old-time political intrigue. Buy only for demand. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/89.
- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.