Jetta Carleton (1913–1999)

Maybe that was the way it went, that all your life you heard the singing and never got any closer. There were things you wanted all your life, and after a while and all of a sudden, you weren’t any closer than you ever were and there was no time left.

This is a novel about life, the messy, chaotic, craziness; the infinite variety; the joy and the sorrow. It is a novel about understanding how lives intertwine and yet how they remain separate; how we depend upon one another, and how we wish to spread our own wings and find our own way. It is about motherhood, fatherhood, sisterhood, and marriage, and the secret, internal lives, each of us lives, whether we intend to or not.

Beautifully written and deeply thoughtful, there are sections of this book that made me feel I was looking at my own reflection, even though none of the events that make up the plot had any semblance to my own life at all. There is a discussion of the nature of God that must surely be among the best treatments of the subject in print, for at its premise lies the essential question that guides belief and faith in the face of all the unfair and inexplicable tragedies every man is sure to know.

Perhaps the greatest struggle in our lives is to come to terms with who we are, as an individual, as a person unique from but in concert with others, a person with faults that we struggle not to have define us. Perhaps the only way to discover that person is to live long enough and to look backward, and perhaps all the looking back in the world will not truly tell us who we are in time. I found this book to be peopled with some of the most realistic characters in fiction--not a perfect saint or an absolute devil among them.

Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance on that smile and saw it all again - the smile and the day, the whole sunny, sad, funny, wonderful day and all the days that we had spent here together. What was I going to do when such days came no more? There could not be many; for we were a family growing old. And how would I learn to live without these people? I who needed them so little that I could stay away all year - what should I do without them?

My immediate reaction was that I would gladly read every word Jetta Carlton had ever written, then sadly discovered that would entail reading only one more book. I could wish for dozens, should they all be as brilliant as this.
… (mais)

A principios de los años cincuenta, Matthew Soames, maestro en un colegio rural, y su mujer, Callie, disfrutan del final del verano en su granja de las afueras de Renfro, Misuri, en la que criaron a sus cuatro enérgicas hijas: la mayor, Jessica; Leonie, la más responsable; la indómita Mathy, que dejó sus estudios para casarse con un piloto acrobático, y la pequeña Mary Jo, que abandonó la granja muy joven para trabajar en la televisión en Nueva York. Como cada año, tres de sus hijas acuden a visitarles durante unas semanas. El final de su estancia hace aflorar los recuerdos: las alegrías, decepciones, amores y desengaños que marcaron el paso del tiempo y que parecen haber dominado la vida de las cuatro hermanas. Sin embargo, más allá de lo ocurrido late el profundo amor que los ha mantenido unidos durante todos esos años.… (mais)

The author (1913-1999) grew up in Missouri, graduating from the University of Missouri in 1939. She taught for several years but in 1948 married and moved to NYC where she worked in advertising. In 1962 she published a novel, [The Moonflower Vine], and it became a New York Times bestseller. The book I read this month is her second novel, published posthumously in 2012. [Claire de Lune] is based on Carleton's years as a young woman teaching in high school.

Allen Liles, a naive and idealistic young woman, begins teaching in high school in 1941. She loves books and poetry and wants to her inspire her students to love them too. Eventually a group begins to come to her apartment in the evenings to hear her read. After the students drift off, two of the boys continue to stay and the three form a special friendship. Though she never gives them special treatment in school, townspeople begin to notice she is sometimes with the boys around town in the evenings and the boys are seen going into her apartment. Naturally it's not long before complaints are being made. It's only then she admits to herself that she has fallen in love with one of them and may have ruined her chances for the career she wants and the job she desperately needs.

The book is "old-fashioned" but of course one from a different time. The characters are believable, I wanted to shake some sense into Allen sometimes.… (mais)