Rhode Island Blues [Hardcover]

Fay Weldon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2000

In Rhode Island Blues, Fay Weldon brings her deliciously wicked humor and seasoned wisdom to a story set, for the first time, in America. Two strong, colorful women, Felicity, age eighty-three, and her granddaughter, Sophia, dominate the story. Sophia, a thirty-four-year-old film editor living in London, thinks Felicity is her only living relation. But when she travels to Rhode Island to help Felicity settle into a retirement center, she begins to unravel mysteries about her family history that make her suspect she may have more relatives than she's ever known. As Sophia comes to terms with her grandmother's past, Felicity focuses on life in the present: she learns how to gamble, falls in love, and uncovers nursing home fraud. In Rhode Island Blues, Fay Weldon creates a dizzying story of romance, mystery, and mayhem.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Can true love be found at the age of 83? It comes to pass in Weldon's latest offering (Big Girls Don't Cry, etc.), a jaunty but somewhat jaded romantic caper set in a Rhode Island retirement home and in London's Soho district. Felicity Moore is an attractive, sexually active octogenarian grandmother who has decided to move into the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement, an ominous institution where the staff is motivated to keep the occupants alive via financial inducements. Felicity's granddaughter, Sophia King, is a 34-year-old British film editor who'd rather live in the imaginary world of film (where she can discard unpleasantness on the cutting-room floor) than face the reality of her mother's suicide, her own simultaneous loathing of and longing for progeny, and her apparent lack of family relations aside from Felicity. When Sophia comes to New England to help Felicity settle into the Golden Bowl, she learns that her grandmother had another daughter whom she gave up for adoption more than a half century earlier. While Sophia returns to London in search of her long-lost aunt, Felicity falls in love with a compulsive gambler and together they outsmart the evil and sadistic Nurse Dawn. Between live half-sisters, dead stepchildren and cousins lengthily removed, the reader feels in need of a diagrammed family tree. Weldon's signature caustic humor enlivens this somewhat overwritten story, which succeeds in establishing that the search for ancestry is fairly complicated and usually disappointing. Since this is Weldon's first novel set in America, canny marketing might add more stateside readers to her devoted fans (who won't miss Weldon's name emblazoned across the cover). Agent, Russell Galen, Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Sophia, a 34-year-old London film editor, has always yearned for a bigger family. Her parents are dead; her grandmother, Felicity, lives in Rhode Island. But then Felicity mentions Alison, the daughter she gave up for adoption. Alison is found, along with her children Guy and Lorna, both miserly intellectuals. In a novel spanning both sides of the Atlantic and covering nearly 100 years of family history, Weldon constructs a wickedly humorous and wise novel. Sophia and Felicity, both determined and lively women, anchor the narrative. Sophia wonders about her desultory relationship with Harry Krassner, the large, loud, and charismatic director who ends up in her bed because he is too cheap to take a taxi. Meanwhile, in the Rhode Island nursing home, Felicity, at age 83, falls in love with shady William Johnson and becomes increasingly suspicious of intrusive nurse Dawn. The novel is loose and sprawling but a great deal of fun to read. For all public libraries.
-DYvette Olson, City Univ. Lib., Renton, WA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st American Edition edition (November 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871137755
• ISBN-13: 978-0871137753
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,722,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book, November 5, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rhode Island Blues (Hardcover)

One of her best; I couldn't put it down. An intricate, clever, funny, touching book that is Fay Weldon in top form. The characters feel very real, and their situations are truly compelling. I really enjoyed this book.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't count your chickens, November 17, 2000

By 

Mr. K. Mahoney "Kevin Mahoney" (Punked Books, London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rhode Island Blues (Hardcover)

It would be all too easy to assume from the title of Weldon's latest novel that it is a depressing read. However, I doubt that Weldon could ever seriously be mournful, especially not when you have both nurses and desire inextricably linked, as you have here. There's just a brief mention of Blues hero Stephane Grapelli, but that's just about how far the relevance goes. However, if you do know who Grapelli is, then you may well be of Felicity's generation in this novel. The title's also an oblique reference to Rhode Island Reds, a particularly fancied breed of chicken at the moment. Apparently, these poultry are extremely easy to rear. It's just Felicity's luck however, that she marries an American GI who hasn't a clue about how to run his own farm. She's even more unfortunate in that she believed his tales of a plantation mansion. Fifty years later, the funeral of her son-in-law from this marriage leads to a quite unexpected flirtation with romance.

Admittedly, parts of Felicity's life story are quite grim. Sophia, her only living relative, works in London as a film editor, whilst Felicity herself abides in Connecticut. Felicity has had a minor stroke, and is coming to terms with the reality of her advancing years. Sophia loves her grandmother - it's just that she feels far more comfortable when the Atlantic Ocean is in between them. Her busy life as a film editor means that she cannot just drop everything and be by her grandmother's bedside in Connecticut. Weldon is very perceptive in relating how much guilt can taint love, and how uncomfortable the young can be beside the old.

Sophia, and Charlie the chauffeur, tend to view the world from the perspective of the movies. When Sophia visits an aged relative Weldon notes that this old lady tends to use references from the fairy books of her youth in her conversation. Maybe what Weldon is saying here is that the motion picture is now the dominant form of fiction. Unfortunately, it really grinds my teeth to come across yet another character in an English novel this year that works in the Soho media world. If future readers ever come back to these novels, like Toby Litt's 'Corpsing', and Amy Jenkins' dire 'Honeymoon', they might think that everyone in England was working in film. The only writer who has a credible excuse for writing about Soho is Christopher Fowler who actually works there. The impression I get is that most young English novelists would really much rather prefer writing for the movies, and I can't help but think that this is very sad.

Sophia mentions many films in her narrative, whilst neglecting to mention the most obvious one: 'Harvey'. Okay, so The Golden Bowl is an old peoples' home, but it does stand comparison with the mental institution in Jimmy Stewart's movie. Okay, so you don't get to see the invisible rabbit in 'Rhode Island Blues' either - it's the interaction between the characters and the structure that seems quite similar. You don't see the whole of this story from Sophia's viewpoint, since Weldon chooses to flit between the main characters at times. It's quite a jolt to suddenly see the world from Nurse Dawn's perspective, who seems to be such a minor character otherwise. But then 'Harvey' also strayed from Jimmy Stewart's suspect vision, into other smaller narratives, such as the nurse's romance with the doctor. Although, this being Weldon, the Doctor/Nurse relationship here is far more risqué.

Feliticty's mental health comes into question when she starts seeing a gambling toy boy, and when the staff at The Golden Bowl discover what we've known all along - namely that her Utrillo painting is not a print. With insurance being such a premium in the litigatory States, moves are made to ensure the safe removal of the Utrillo from the Golden Bowl's walls (James Stewart's mental state in 'Harvey' was also brought into question due to a suspect portrait). Unfortunately, Felicity has also let slip to Sophia that she may have more family in England. Sophia, all alone apart from a temporary fling with a film director of Kubrick's stature, can't help but investigate her roots. She finds a couple of quite dull cousins who eventually let her enter their lives. Felicity impulsively decides to remarry at the tender age of 83. Sophia's cousins just as impulsively decide to check out their newly found grandmother, and petulantly join Sophia on her trip to the States. The question on everyone's minds seems to be this: is such an old woman capable of looking after a valuable Utrillo?

Ironically, Utrillo spent much of his own life in and out of institutions, with painting his only therapy. From this point of view, it's very fitting that his work should end up on the walls of an institution like The Golden Bowl. Sophia recognises the name of the old peoples' home as deriving from a passage in Ecclesiastes. No doubt it is also a reference to the novel of the same name - that also featured a suspected gold digger. What this novel seems to be about broadly, is the clash between the new and the old: the disparities between British and American culture, the contrast between the generations, and old and new forms of fiction. Several novels this year have discussed a problem which currently troubles Western culture: what to do with an ever aging population, from Will Self's vulgar 'How the Dead Live', to Barbara Kingsolver's life-affirming 'Prodigal Summer'. Weldon comes somewhere in between the two extremes. There is something quite merciless about some of her observations, mostly concerning the immigrant Charlie and his ever-increasing family. But most chilling and timely of all is Sophia's disquieting journey on Concorde. However, Weldon provides us with a mixed dish here; not all of her prognosis is quite as gloomy as this. The blues are there, but playing quietly in the background with the reds.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An avid reader belonging to a book club, August 31, 2001

By 

Joanne H. Villforth (Derwood, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rhode Island Blues (Hardcover)

As I started reading this book, I felt the author was a very negative person. At the end I still had this feeling, but it was a compelling story none the less. Her writing style made me think, and I had to go back and read several passages again to get the full meaning of her words. The story was a depressing one for the characters, but their life's stories intertwining with each other were fascinating. I'm so glad she didn't let all her characters have the typical happy ending leaving you to feel that their lives would still be full of ups and downs.