Customer Reviews

So Long at the Fair

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This mercurial story of love and adultery in a small Wisconsin town spans the course of three decades and serves as undeniable proof positive that people don't always learn from their mistakes or the mistakes of others.

Two stories, inextricably linked, are related to the reader in alternating chapters. Each of the plotlines is character driven and telegraphs a sense of foreboding. Agilely pivoting between one fateful night in 1963 and a single hot July day some thirty years later, Schwartz deftly intertwines the two stories to give us an evocative portrait of sympathetic individuals caught up in unsympathetic situations.

When a writer of Schwartz's caliber has proven her ability to produced jewels such as All is Vanity and Drowning Ruth one tends to view future offerings with a more critical eye. Although better than a lot of writer's best work, one always expects more from those whose obvious talent sets them apart from the rest. For this reason, this reader found So Long at the Fair to be a little heavy handed in its resolution and definitely lacking the insight into the foibles of the human animal so accurately and flawlessly characterized in her previous works. For this reason.........3 stars.

I didn't know what to expect from this book (I haven't read Schwartz's other books), but I found its evocation of time and place pitch-perfect, its dissection of character probing but generous, and its examination of marriage penetrating and poignant. Moreover, it's a page-turning suspense novel. I really loved this book--and I'm turning next to All is Vanity.

Could "So Long at the Fair" by Christina Schwartz, involve a bigger group of unlikable characters? There is the lying cheating husband, the messy self-centered wife, the other woman who believes "she" is not the one cheating, and the nerdy, creepy stalker. Then we have a confusing, predictable and totally unnecessary back story set in 1963. Where was the editor with the sense to cut that entirely?

All this mess makes it too easy to hate them all which makes it difficult to appreciate the sub-text and the underlying human conditions that can make a story of adultery interesting, human and compelling.

This a great story - a family saga about the secrets underlying a failing marriage that culminates in a completely unexpected conflagration that has the power to restore the shaken union. There are two, interwoven stories: a present-day one about the man, his wife and his mistres - all of whom have set in motion a plan that can only result in the wife's discovery of the affair - and a story set in the early nineteen sixties, describing some mysterious evetns that took place among the parents of this man and wife. I loved everything about this book, from the unbearable tension of watching the husband about to be caught out in his lies, to the gradual revelation about what happened so long ago to doom this marriage. But what blew me away was the ending - a double ending, actually - that reveals the mystery of the past, and also brings the players of the present-day story into an unforgettable, dramatic confrontation. "Drowning Ruth" is my all-time favorite novel, and it is great to see Schwarz returning to that territory of family secrets and the mystery of marital passion.

At first, I liked this book. I was interested in the characters, I wondered what was going to happen next. I thought the pacing and the 2 story lines were intriguing. I was curious how they were connected and not only what happened in the past, but what's going to happen in the future as well with these characters. But then about 3/4 through the book, I started to wonder if there was going to be a satisfying conclusion. It felt like the author did a good job of setting up an interesting premise, but then didn't know where to go from there. Sure enough, the last 1/4 of the book failed to live up to my expectations. The end was far too short, considering all the build up we went through to get to that point. Overall, I wanted more. I wouldn't recommend this book.

This book seemed to be all over the place and I was really waiting for the climax that never came. The whole set up was a bit drawn out and I felt like there were no consequences for Jon. Will Ginny ever find out? Will Kaiser tell her? What about Winifred? What about her feelings? Did Jon just not even care? Is he just as bad as his mother? Why weren't these things answered in this book? We were left to come up with our own conclusions. Which if we did that then why even bother reading the book to begin with?

I loved "Drowning Ruth". I was excited to read this book. I'm usually pretty adept at getting plot connections. But I found myself referring back to the first couple pages again and again to try and work out what character from the past, was connected to the current characters. Totally confused. Was hopiong for resolution by the end, but didn't get any. The book would've been a perfectly fine read without all the flashbacks to characters that never entirely connected to the current characters. Not her best. Happy I picked this up from the library and didn't buy it.

Although Schwarz's forte is usually in her character development that carries the story, this novel lags as far as having a really gripping and interesting plot. We never quite get to plumb the depths of the characters' motivations or thoughts as the story evolves, briefly sizzles, and then sputters to an unsatisfying conclusion.

The events of this novel take place on a single July day. Jon, an advertising executive is having an affair with a co-worker, Freddie. His wife, Ginny -- a landscape designer, is clueless and blunders on about her business after a morning argument with Jon. Meanwhile, he is on his way to a summer fair with his new love. Jon is trying to decide what to do about his predicament -- should he leave Ginny and be with Freddie? Ginny is clueless about the adultery even though Jon's business partner is about to sabotage the situation. The point of view jumps back and forth between the main characters, but an annoying side plot emerges -- and involves confusing situations from the past lives of their parents.

The conclusion is unclear and the purpose of the story is not made evident to the reader who is left, hanging, at the end.

If you want to read this, borrow it, don't buy it. A previous book by this author, Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club), is definitely the better one. This whole story never quite got off the ground and was disappointing.

So Long at the Fair is the story of pivotal day in the Life of Jon and Ginny. The couple are high school sweethearts who found their connection due to a devastating accident and have been married for several years. Ginny is a lovable pack rat whose gardening business is beginning to flourish, while Jon is a typical type-A advertising executive, driven and focused on Freddi, a woman outside of their marriage. The novel frames an intense day when Jon must decide whether to abandon his fledgling affair, or to continue it and leave Ginny behind. Sprinkled throughout this story is the story of Bud and Marie, Jon's parents, whose actions are told in flashback. Bud and Marie's actions have had repercussions that have impacted Jon and Ginny's life, and brought them where they are today. As the couple spends the day separated by an argument, both examine the relationship and and remember the events that ultimately brought them together. In between we learn of Freddi's attempts to dissuade a persistent admirer who doesn't seem to know when to let go, and Ginny's decision to do business with a man who has a shadowy connection to her past.

This book had a strange effect on me. I found the tenuous construction of the plot to be very difficult to keep track of. Many times it was confusing as to when in the specific time period action was taking place, or who the characters were in relation to one another. This was particularly so in the flashback portions of the book. The modern sections were more easily construed, but those sections had their difficulties as well. In particular, the way the back story was woven together was a little annoying. Instead of getting the full story at one time, the author chose to distribute the information in several bits, alternating between Jon and Ginny. Many of the secondary characters seemed to be underdeveloped and hazy as well, and I found most of the characters in this book to be very unlikable, especially Freddi. She seemed to have quite an attitude of self-importance, and her personality teetered between smugness and insecurity for most of the book. The male characters too were unsatisfying, as I found them to be unfeeling and somewhat uncommunicative. The only character that I felt any affinity for was Ginny; she seemed to be more expressive and her motives were more realistic. It is possible that the instances of infidelity were what turned me off in this book, but I rather think it was the way the situation was portrayed and the callousness of the characters that bothered me. Despite all this, I found that the story moved along with a great amount of force and direction, and I was compelled to keep reading. The author did a good job of maintaining the tension and urgency of the story despite the structural and character flaws. The ending was somewhat of a slow deflation of the story, and I think in some ways it worked, but in others it ways was anticlimactic. I am of two minds about the ending of this book because it gives the reader the opportunity to draw their own conclusions as to what happens next, but at the same time, after following the events leading up to the moment, it seems a bit of a cop-out for the resolution to be withheld.

All in all I found this book to be one I liked very much, and at the same time not at all. There was a lot going on structurally that I felt could have been done more evenly and efficiently, but at the same time there was a great driving force behind the narrative that kept me focused on the important elements of the story. I found that immediately after finishing the book I felt cold towards it, yet after a few days of thinking and digesting it, I liked it more. I would recommend this book with one caveat: this book needs to be appreciated as a whole, because the individual parts can be dissatisfying on their own.

It's pretty hard to write freshly about extramarital affairs --- Tolstoy and Flaubert did it rather well, after all --- and still more difficult to be honest and accurate about how a marriage feels from the inside (if you've never been married, you don't know; if you are married, it feels disloyal). Christina Schwarz attempts both in SO LONG AT THE FAIR, limiting herself rigorously to a single crucial day in the life of a not-so-romantic triangle. Jon and Ginny are a childless couple, neither entirely happy nor desperately mismatched; Freddi is Jon's advertising agency colleague and mistress.

Schwarz does well with Jon's sense of being "unmoored" --- his guilty, shifting states of mind as he vacillates between genuine devotion to Ginny and fierce attraction to Freddi. But this is not a novel told from a single-pointed perspective. We also hear what Ginny and Freddi are thinking --- both women are nervous, angry and mostly keeping their true feelings under wraps --- and Jon's workmate Kaiser, who knows about the affair but hasn't (yet) spilled the beans. And, just for good measure, we get a creepy look inside the brain of Ethan, the obsessive-compulsive guy with a crush on Freddi.

Schwarz, it seems, wants to examine the affair in Rashomon-like fashion, suggesting that there is no whole, absolute truth to a marriage but only a range of fragmentary visions. She keeps us in suspense about what Jon will do, whether Ginny will find out, and how Freddi and Ethan's story will develop. All this is plausible. I loved her opening scene, a fight between Jon and Ginny about nothing --- and everything. Schwarz grasps the way one takes the temperature of a vulnerable marriage as with a sick child, alternately feeling safe or uncertain or furious or blessed. She gets its massive presence in an individual's life, a presence in which love or desire or contentment becomes almost irrelevant.

Jon's mother told him, when he first became engaged to Ginny, that "marriage is a heavy thing," and late in the book he realizes she was right: "[H]e saw suddenly, vividly, that that heaviness, that fabric of understandings and misunderstandings, of events witnessed, celebrated, and mourned, of dependable support and casual betrayal, of happy occasions of agreement and of never-ending accommodations both willing and grudging, that union, enduring despite insults and neglect, relentlessly invested with hope, had become the bulk of his life."

If Schwarz had left it at that, I would have found SO LONG AT THE FAIR an absorbing, intelligent book. However, she chose not only to play with multiple viewpoints and numerous flashbacks, but also to lard the novel with an italicized subplot, a skeletal, murky tale of love and violence from 1963. Its relevance to the main story doesn't become clear until close to the end of the novel, when we find out how the modern protagonists are related through their parents' older ties. I can't say more than that without giving away the plot; suffice it to say that it involves rape, revenge and a near-fatal accident.

I understand that Schwarz might want to use this backstory to suggest how the secrets and dramas of the past ripple out to touch other lives and generations. But I became so confused by the double narratives that at one point I had to make a diagram of the characters and their connections to one another! Old-fashioned historical novels give you family trees at the beginning and helpful maps. Perhaps this tricky breed of modern fiction needs to do the same.

In an interview, Schwarz acknowledges that she had intended the 1963 plot line to be an entirely separate novel; although it grew out of SO LONG AT THE FAIR, "it was obviously too much of a digression to stand as a chapter." But when a friend commented on the thematic relatedness of the two stories and urged her to make them part of the same book, Schwarz says, "the ol' break-it-into-italicized-sections idea occurred to me and to my surprise it worked."

No, it didn't. I got tired of guessing who was who, and the subplot simply distracted me from the heart of the novel (and its most immediate and compelling aspect): Jon, Ginny and Freddi's story. There seems to be a vogue these days for writing books that jump between decades or juggle past and present. Well handled, this is a wonderfully complex and evocative technique; done mechanically, it just gums up the works.

SO LONG AT THE FAIR nonetheless has many attractive and satisfying aspects, not the least of which is Schwarz's skill at recreating the small-town setting. The local country club is an evocative reference point. Once a thriving concern and a locus of assignation and danger, it is now derelict, its golf course a tangled woodland that Ginny, a landscape architect, is hired to work on as part of a high-end housing development. Class tensions, always exaggerated in a community where a few families rule the roost and everybody knows everybody else, rumble underneath the drama. The title isn't just metaphorical; there is an actual fair (Summerfest, the big music festival held annually near Milwaukee) at which all the protagonists wind up at the end of the day --- and the novel --- in an eventful denouement.

Schwarz is talented. I'll definitely read her next book, and it was no great hardship to get through this one. I appreciate her sense of place, her powers of observation, and her gift for building ordinary yet fascinating characters. But in SO LONG AT THE FAIR, I'm afraid that she loses sight of the whole and leaves the reader floundering.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman