A Place at the Table [Paperback]

Edith Konecky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1989

Fiction ... A sharp and tender portrait of a New York woman as she faces the end of love, the comoplexities of friend- ship, and her own mortality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A gentle, clear-eyed honesty distinguishes this coming-of-middle-age novel by the author of Allegra Maud Goldman. Rachel Levin is a divorced novelist of mid-list success who lives in Manhattan, where she has a small circle of intimate friends and a lover, a young woman lawyer, with whom she's about to break up. In the quiet course of the unstructured, episodic story, Rachel writes a "treatment" for a story packager and begins a new novel. She suffers when her friend Margo is left by her husband; she visits one of her sons on the birth of his first child, breaks off with her lover, and undergoes--too abruptly--a mastectomy, all the while remembering bits and pieces of her life. At tale's end she meets another friend, a writer turned bag-lady, on a subway and has a final conversation that is both utterly natural and redeeming. Rachel is a thoroughly recognizable human being, compassionate, cruel, self-absorbed and a true friend. Her story unfolds as a life does; that is the novel's achievement and its failing.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is an entertaining novel, set in New York City, about coming to terms with late middle age and all its erosions. Long divorced, with grown children, Rachel Levin sees her current lover (a young woman) drifting away, her friend's marriage crashing, and , worst of all, writer's block denying her the consolations of work. Using flashbacks, Konecky describes with ironic compassion a whole array of characters struggling with middle age a la middle class: Deirdre, talented and clever, drifing from eccentricty to madness; Margo, writing steamy-sex best sellers instead of literature; Lisa, ambivalent about sex, career, and identity; and Rachel's son, Henry, whose family turns the unconventional Rachel inexorably into a conventional mother-in-law in spite of her determined resistance. A funny, lively look at the upheavals that seem to be increasingly unavoidable rites of passage for us all.
- Ann Donovan, Central Washington Univ. Lib., Ellensburg
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 252 pages
• Publisher: Hamilton Stone Editions; 3 edition (December 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965404331
• ISBN-13: 978-0965404334
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #654,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From the N. Y. Times, reviewed by Barbara Fisher Williamson, January 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Place at the Table (Paperback)

A divorced mother of two and a moderately successful New York writer, Rachel Levin is smart, funny, generous, and above all else, clear-eyed. A Place at the Table concerns a period in Rachel's life when she is ending a relationship with a much younger woman, becoming a grandmother, considering writing trashy novels for money, consoling a friend whose marriage is foundering, attempting to rescue Deirdre, another friend, from madness and confronting her own mortality. It is the definitions sand distinctions between Rachel and Deirdre that make the novel not just warm and witty but poignant and sage. Rachel has no fantasies about the madness that art creates or demands. Art and madness are separate, and there is nothing glamorous in her friend's decline. It is all loss. Similarly, there is nothing romantic in Rachel's own suffering. Loss is loss, art is art, trash is trash. Rachel closes her story counting her blessings, the usual ones --- work, children, friends, means, appetites. Pleasures of the mind and body, simple and comples. Sanity. And I still have one breast. This list, when one reaches it at the end of the novel, seems suddenly new and fresh, graceful and funny. The ordinary words have taken on the extraordinasry power of this wonderful, wise woman.