CultureWatch Review: Anna Quindlin's Still Life With Bread Crumbs

STILL LIFE WITH BREAD CRUMBS

Published by Random House; Hardcover, 252 pp.

Reading on the beach; Wikimedia Commons

A story about a later-than-middle-aged New Yorker (Rebecca Winter) who has had to face the fact of a long unhappy marriage that ended in divorce, and has run off to the country? Who is an artist (photographer) of erstwhile note, and who knows nothing of rural living or small-town mores? Who doesn’t recognize a common nuisance creature in the attic of her rented cabin, but ends up falling for the rough-hewn roofer who rescues her? Don’t let this (unfair) synopsis scare you away from another of Anna Quindlen’s masterful revelations of how she perceives what makes people tick.

Quindlen uses succinct prose of the kind honed by years of journalism and conscious editing. You never have a sense of missing something you want or need to know about where and when a scene takes place. Atmosphere is made almost palpable by the kind of attention to significant detail that makes each one come to life — sometimes by pointing out what’s absent. "She needed to reclaim the syntax of her daily existence, upended in this strange little town." Rebecca Winter lived in a Manhattan high-rise with a gym where she exercised daily, and walked to the deli to get her breakfast bagel. Where she is now, there are no sidewalks.

As in her other novels, Quindlen crafts individuals so real you think sometimes you might have met one of them. No one is an exaggeration of a particular characteristic either physical or intellectual. Dialogue is as naturalistic as it comes, which makes each person immediately recognizable when he or she says anything.

Because the decline of Rebecca's fame and fortune comes at a time when both her parents are in rapid decline, when her agent seems to have not much interest in her or her work, and when money has become an unavoidable preoccupation, the situation in which Rebecca finds herself is pretty bleak. She can’t help obsessing over her shrinking bank account. Flashbacks showing her hopelessly egocentric husband, her egomaniacal agent, and her abstracted and seemingly insensitive son make it a wonder that Quindlen invests her heroine (not too strong a word for her) with such objectivity and humor.

You really want to know how and if Rebecca can even survive the rural winter, let alone the financial burdens and loneliness to which she seems to have become a victim. As time passes, Rebecca begins to hike in the woods. What she runs across there becomes the material for a recovery of her artistic sense, and provides some wonderful renditions of how nature strikes an urban sensibility long deprived of it. The discoveries also become central to the denouement — truly symbolic.

After too many novels whose focus seems (if the reader is honest with herself) to be on the sexual antics and sensations involved with falling and being in love, this is a welcome rendition that allows for how real people after the flush of youth must behave. It seems likely that it would take a writer of Quinlen’s reputation to be allowed to have her two main characters act as they do. You will believe it all, and really root for a happy ending.

This might be a tad more serious than an ideal 'beach read', but if you enjoy subtlety, humor, only a touch of melodrama, and a happy acceptance of the people in the story as friends and acquaintances, living in a world controlled by Mother Nature (as opposed to manmade attempts to conquer her), you will be glad you gave this novel your time. It’s a wonderful example of 'less is more' at its best.

Culture and Arts, Literature and Poetry, Culture Watch, Gift Shopping, Shop for Yourself, Senior Women Web, Articles, Joan L. Cannon, Book Reviews, Authors, What's New

CultureWatch Review: Anna Quindlin's Still Life With Bread Crumbs

More Articles