A Stone Boat [Paperback]

Andrew Solomon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1996

An urgent, closely observed, deeply conflicted, elegant account . . . a winning blend of emotional intensity and elevated lyricism." (Los Angeles Times)

The New York Times Book Review praised A Stone Boat as "a shimmering remembrance of things past and a meditation on love and death." Newsday called it "intense and achingly beautiful."

Andrew Solomon tells an exquisitely perceptive story of family, identity, and the changes wrought by grief and loss. Harry, an internationally celebrated concert pianist, arrives in Paris to confront his glamorous mother about his homosexuality. Instead, he discovers that she is terminally ill. In an attempt to escape his feelings of guilt and depression at the prospect of her death, he embarks on a series of intense love affairs that force him to question his sexual identity. But as time runs out and tragedy looms closer, it is the relationship between Harry and his mother that emerges in all its stark simplicity and purity.

Part eulogy and part confession, A Stone Boat is a luminous and moving evocation of the love between a son and his mother.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though he's a rising classical pianist recording his first CD, Harry is experiencing "the saddest period of my life." His mother is dying of cancer and she blames her illness on his homosexuality. "My mother wanted me to have a perfect life, more perfect even than hers," Harry, who's in his mid-20s, observes in his wish to be seen as both a good son and an independent man. What he's keeping secret from his mother, however, is that, inspired by his attraction to a female friend, he's becoming aware of his fundamental bisexuality. Solomon's prose is stylish, sometimes beautiful, but it suffers from a vagueness that hovers about the relationships it describes ("When something saddened me, she came and joined me in my pain," says Harry of his mother). The characters live in a world of upper-class homes and hotels in Paris, London and Manhattan, with weekends in country homes and maids and chauffeurs at their disposal, a backdrop of privilege that sometimes edges into preciousness ("I associate my mother's entire illness with cut flowers," Harry notes). Yet the contrast between the idyllic existence money can buy and the inexorable ugliness of death is poignantly obvious. Harry's struggle to cope with his parent's impending death is observed with passion and conviction. Solomon (The Ivory Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost), a senior writer for the New York Times Magazine, shows great promise in his fiction debut.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Love and death make dramatic entrances in this elegiac first novel by nonfiction writer Solomon (The Ivory Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost, 1991) about a young concert pianist who plays for time while his mother is dying of cancer. First-person narrator Harry is under 30, gay, and always striving for perfection in his music, his sexual partners, and his aesthetic rhetoric, with which he tries heroically (and sometimes pretentiously) to wring beauty from the ordinary while visiting stylish locations in London, Paris, and Manhattan. He observes the textures of flowers, different foods, the surfaces of bodies. Harry also picks a fight with his bland lover Bernard and has three intense affairs, one with a longtime female friend, to escape his depression over his mother's terminal illness. Early in the novel, she blames her suffering on his homosexuality and tries to manipulate him into a more conventional life style: ``I know you think you're being honest or true to yourself or something, but what you have with Bernard can't be greater than that combination of love and children that you could have with Helen or someone.'' The mother, still in her 50s, does not want to die early, but she also doesn't want her last days to be horrific. When chemotherapy does not appear to have halted the cancer, she plans her date with death as carefully as if it were a wedding, attending a party the week before in a grand show of matriarchal dignity as she climbs a staircase unassisted. ``One step at a time, regal as the Queen of Sheba, my mother climbed that staircase. The long rope of pearls swung slightly as she walked, as though it were telling time,'' writes Solomon in one particularly poignant passage. An elegant and moving examination of a difficult subject. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Plume (February 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452274982
• ISBN-13: 978-0452274983
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,354,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A FAN LETTER, August 24, 2001

By 

MOVIE MAVEN (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Stone Boat (Paperback)

Dear Andrew Solomon, This is a fan letter: PLEASE keep writing such beautiful fiction. PLEASE write another novel as soon as possible. I have never come across Solomon's prose in "The New Yorker" and have not read his two non-fiction books, one about artists in the Soviet Union and one about Depression. A STONE BOAT is his first novel. It was a birthday gift to me and I read it in three days. I then waited one day and read it all over again. It is one of the most elegantly written novels I've ever read: Solomon chooses words as if they were precious jewels and then sets them perfectly. And yet, the reader is never conscious of the author, as Armistead Maupin says, "using a ten dollar word when a ten cent word will do." A STONE BOAT tells of a gifted classical pianist, Harry, at the beginning of what will no doubt be a major career. An American living in London, Harry joins his privileged family for what is supposed to be a joyous holiday in France. But it is here that they learn that Harry's mother has cancer. This tragedy is the centerpiece of the narrative, but it is the lives that touch Harry's and his mother's that make the book even more fascinating and complex, funny, charming and, above all, achingly beautiful. The novel is not packed with scores of characters. Rather it is an intimate story of a family and the few who are their satellites: from Harry's good-hearted, passive, British male lover to his wise and strong American girlfriend, from his unforgiving, tough-minded agent to his hedonistic sex partner, Nick. It is, in the end, a story of life conquering death, of a family bonding at first to refuse Death admittance to their home and then, finally, conspiring to help one of their own die, in her own way and time by her own hand with dignity and grace. This is a once-in-a-lifetime read: a novel to cherish. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazingly articulate and moving novel...a must-read!, March 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: A Stone Boat (Paperback)

Andrew Solomon's "A Stone Boat" is a remarkable first novel. The author's mastery of the English language and the way he uses it to create senses of setting and character are incredible. There is much to admire, too, in Mr. Solomon's way with a story. His characters are real as are their relationships. Harry, the main charactor/narrator, describes his mother upon first sight in the most extraordinary way - close your eyes and you see her sitting across the room. This passage is one to read and re-read all the while savoring the beauty of the language and the sheer descriptive powers of the author. Do not lend this book to your friends or you will never see it again - the prose is that remarkable. One hopes Mr. Solomon is working on his second, third and fourth books as this review is being written.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful novel, May 18, 1999

By 

Richard Zimler (Portugal) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Stone Boat (Paperback)

This is a very touching and wonderfully written novel. Every scene in it has the feel of authenticity. Highly recommended for readers willing to let themselves be moved emotionally by powerful prose.