Every last one

Anna Quindlen

Book - 2010

Mary Beth Latham is first and foremost a mother, whose three teenaged children come first, before her career as a landscape gardener, or even her life as the wife of a doctor. Caring for her family and preserving their everyday life is paramount. And so, when one of her sons, Max, becomes depressed, Mary Beth becomes focused on him, and is blindsided by a shocking act of violence.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House c2010.
Language
English
Main Author
Anna Quindlen (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
299 p. ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781400065745
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IF it's true that traits like noveltyseeking and risk-aversion are genetic in origin, then Mary Beth Latham's biological makeup appears to be tilted toward safety and security. Mary Beth, the narrator of Anna Quindlen's engrossing new novel, "Every Last One," values stability and sameness, finding quiet contentment in her long, amiable marriage to an ophthalmologist and in her flourishing career as a landscaper. But her most intense feelings and greatest concerns are centered on her three teenage children: lovely Ruby, nearing her last year of high school, and the twins, Max and Alex, who will be freshmen next year. The Lathams' busy, welcoming household, a study in domestic tranquility, is a magnet for friends of all ages. But there are curious ripples beneath this happy surface. Does the fact that Ruby has teetered on the edge of anorexia have mostly to do with normal growing pains or is there something darker, more troublesome to blame? And what about Ruby's increasing wish to free herself from a cloying romance with her childhood playmate and high school sweetheart, who seems to be a constant presence in the Latham household? As for the twins, they're a study in yin and yang. Alex is outgoing, comfortable in his own skin, on his way to making the high school soccer team; Max (called Max the Mute by his classmates) is clumsy and rarely speaks. IT seems unlikely that violence could erupt in the peaceful, countrified New England town where the Lathams live. Yet early in the novel one of Mary Beth's large landscaping jobs ("six tiers of shrubs, a small copse of flowering plum and pear, a long hedge of weigela") is vandalized, the plantings uprooted and carried off overnight. "I don't mean to sound hysterical, but I am really freaked out by this," she tells the policeman who arrives to inspect the damage. Mary Beth and her women friends talk about everything, husbands excepted. You wonder why - until all three of the Latham children go off for the summer and their parents are left alone. Instead of enjoying a second honeymoon, Mary Beth and her husband stolidly continue with their daily routines, saying little to each other. But on her way home from work, Mary Beth sometimes finds herself crying, "for reasons that are overwhelming and mysterious." What if she were to tell her husband about this, she wonders. "'Why?' he would have said, and what could I tell him? Could I sit opposite this open-faced man, with his pink cheeks and his warm brown eyes . . . and say, 'Loneliness'? Worse still, what if he said that he had done the same, felt the same? Then where would we all be?" ONE mellow September afternoon at the end of that summer, Ruby explains chaos theory to her mother: how the beating of a butterfly's wings in Mexico could raise a breeze in their own back yard. "That's kind of terrifying," Mary Beth replies. Is she thinking of the out-of-character risk she once took, a brief affair long ago with the husband of a woman who had been a close friend, and the chain of events - the shaky couple's subsequent divorce - the affair may have set in motion? It would be unfair to reveal what happens to the Lathams, other than to say that tragedy of an outrageous, almost unbelievable, dimension strikes at the heart of the family. The events leading to this catastrophe, and then its painful aftermath, make for a spellbinding tale. There are curious ripples below the tranquil surface of this welcoming household in a countrified town. Maggie Scarf is the author of "September Songs" and "Intimate Partners." She is writing a book about remarriage.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 18, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review

Unforeseen catastrophe and how we cope with it is fiction's raison d'etre, yet few novelists can turn the innocent before and the shattered after into fiction as accessible, specific, authentic, graceful, touching, and radiant as Quindlen's. In her sixth magnetizing novel, we know early on that something horrible is going to happen in the Latham household, which we experience through the keen senses and swirling thoughts of Mary Beth. Contentedly married to an ophthalmologist (an ironic profession, given how many clues to the impending tragedy she and her husband fail to see), she runs a landscape design business and attends ardently to her children: beautiful and creative teen Ruby, and slightly younger twin sons, who are so unalike they barely seem related. Kiernan, Ruby's boyfriend, is also an integral part of the hectic, happy household. Mary Beth's narrative voice is not only reliable but also irresistible, and after she survives the unthinkable, her struggle to reconstruct her life evolves into a penetrating inquiry into the bewilderment of grief. But for all of Quindlen's bold and invaluable insights into anguish and recovery, what stands out most are her charming and insightful portrayals of mercurial, marvelous teenagers, her fluency in the complexity of family dynamics, and her deep understanding of mother love.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In her latest, Quindlen (Rise and Shine) once again plumbs the searing emotions of ordinary people caught in tragic circumstances. Mary Beth Latham is a happily married woman entirely devoted to her three teenaged children. When her talented daughter Ruby casually announces she's breaking up with her boyfriend Kirenan, a former neighbor who's become like family, Mary Beth is slightly alarmed, but soon distracted by her son Max, who's feeling overshadowed by his extroverted, athletic twin brother Alex. Quindlen's novel moves briskly, propelled by the small dramas of summer camp, proms, soccer games and neighbors, until the rejected Kirenan blindsides the Lathams, and the reader, with an incredible act of violence. Left with almost nothing, Mary Beth struggles to cope with loss and guilt, protect what she has left, and regain a sense of meaning. Quindlen is in classic form, with strong characters and precisely cadenced prose that builds in intensity. (Apr.) Copyright 2010 Reed Business Information.


Review by Library Journal Review

Mary Beth Latham seems to have an idyllic life in a Vermont town as the wife of a respected doctor and the mother of three teenagers. But her son Max has been withdrawn and depressed, unlike his outgoing and popular twin, Alex, and her moody and sensitive daughter, Ruby, wants to break up with her emotionally needy boyfriend, who is practically a member of the family. Quindlen gives her readers an ominous sense of impending tragedy, but it still arrives with a shock. The book is divided into before and after, and it is compulsive reading. You might find yourself racing through the story, which could be drawn from today's headlines or TV news, and only later reflecting on how skillful the author is in her portrayal of family life in all its little details and in her flawless pacing. Verdict This gripping novel will undoubtedly be the choice of many book groups, too. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/10.]-Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This is my life: The alarm goes off at five-thirty with the murmuring of a public-radio announcer, telling me that there has been a coup in Chad, a tornado in Texas. My husband stirs briefly next to me, turns over, blinks, and falls back to sleep for another hour. My robe lies at the foot of the bed, printed cotton in the summer, tufted chenille for the cold. The coffeemaker comes on in the kitchen below as I leave the bathroom, go downstairs in bare feet, pause to put away a pair of boots left splayed in the downstairs back hallway and to lift the newspaper from the back step. The umber quarry tiles in the kitchen were a bad choice; they are always cold. I let the dog out of her kennel and put a cup of kibble in her bowl. I hate the early mornings, the suspended animation of the world outside, the veil of black and then the oppressive gray of the horizon along the hills outside the French doors. But it is the only time I can rest without sleeping, think without deciding, speak and hear my own voice. It is the only time I can be alone. Slightly less than an hour each weekday when no one makes demands. Our bedroom is at the end of the hall, and sometimes as I pass I can hear the children breathing, each of them at rest as specific as they are awake. Alex inhales and exhales methodically, evenly, as though he were deep under the blanket of sleep even though he always kicks his covers askew, leaving one long leg, with its faint surgical scars, exposed to the night air. Across the room Max sputters, mutters, turns, and growls out a series of nonsense syllables. For more than a year when he was eleven, Max had a problem with sleepwalking. I would find him washing his hands at the bathroom sink or down in the kitchen, blinking blindly into the open refrigerator. But he stopped after his first summer at sleepaway camp. Ruby croons, one high strangled note with each exhale. When she was younger, I worried that she had asthma. She sleeps on her back most of the time, the covers tucked securely across her chest, her hair fanned out on the pillows. It should be easy for her to slip from beneath the blanket and make her bed, but she never bothers unless I hector her. I sit downstairs with coffee and the paper, staring out the window as my mind whirrs. At six-thirty I hear the shower come on in the master bath. Glen is awake and getting ready for work. At six-forty-five I pull the duvet off Ruby, who snatches it back and curls herself into it, larval, and says, "Ten more minutes." At seven I lean over, first Alex, then Max, and bury my nose into their necks, beginning to smell the slightly pungent scent of male beneath the sweetness of child. "Okay, okay," Alex says irritably. Max says nothing, just lurches from bed and begins to pull off an oversized T-shirt as he stumbles into the bathroom. There is a line painted down the center of their room. Two years ago they came to me, at a loose end on a June afternoon, and demanded the right to choose their own colors. I was distracted, and I agreed. They did a neat job, measured carefully, put a tarp on the floor. Alex painted his side light blue, Max lime green. The other mothers say, "You won't believe what Jonathan"--or Andrew or Peter--"told me about the twins' room." Maybe if the boys had been my first children I would have thought it was insane, too, but Ruby broke me in. She has a tower of soda cans against one wall of her bedroom. It is either an environmental statement or just one of those things you do when you are fifteen. Now that she is seventeen she has outgrown it, almost forgotten it, but because I made the mistake of asking early on when she would take it down she never has. I open Ruby's door, and although it doesn't make a sound--she has oiled the hinges, I think, probably with baby oil or bath oil or something else nonsensically inappropriate, so we will not hear it creak in the nighttime--she says, "I'm up." I stand there waiting, because if I take her word for it she will wrap herself in warmth again and fall into the long tunnel of sleep that only teenagers inhabit, halfway to coma or unconsciousness. "Mom, I'm up," she shouts, and throws the bedclothes aside and begins to bundle her long wavy hair atop her head. "Can I get dressed in peace, please? For a change?" She makes it sound as though I constantly let a bleacher full of spectators gawk as she prepares to meet the day. Only Glen emerges in the least bit cheerful, his suit jacket over one arm. He keeps his white coats at the office. They are professionally cleaned and pressed and smell lovely, like the cleanest of clean laundry. "Doctor Latham" is embroidered in blue script above his heart. From upstairs I can hear the clatter of the cereal into his bowl. He eats the same thing every morning, leaves for work at the same time. He wears either a blue or a yellow shirt, with either a striped tie or one with a small repeating pattern. Occasionally, a grateful patient gives him a tie as a gift, printed with tiny pairs of glasses, an eye chart, or even eyes themselves. He thanks these people sincerely but never wears them. He is not tidy, but he knows where everything is: on which chair he left his briefcase, in what area of the kitchen counter he tossed his wallet. He does something with the corners of his mouth when things are not as they should be--when the dog is on the furniture, when the children and their friends make too much noise too late at night, when the red-wine glasses are in the white-wine glass rack. It has now pressed itself permanently into his expression, like the opposite of dimples. "Please. Spare me," says my friend Nancy, her eyes rolling. "If that's the worst you can say about him, then you have absolutely no right to complain." Nancy says her husband, Bill, a tall gangly scarecrow of a guy, leaves a trail of clothing as he undresses, like fairy-tale breadcrumbs. He once asked her where the washing machine was. "I thought it was a miracle that he wanted to know," she says when she tells this story, and she does, often. "It turned out the repairman was at the door and Bill didn't know where to tell him to go." Our washer is in the mudroom, off the kitchen. There is a chute from above that is designed to bring the dirty things downstairs. Over the years, our children have used the chute for backpacks, soccer balls, drumsticks. Slam. Slam. Slam. "It is a laundry chute," I cry. "Laundry. Laundry." Laundry is my life, and meals, and school meetings and games and recitals. I choose a cardigan sweater and put it on the chest at the foot of the bed. It is late April, nominally spring, but the weather is as wild as an adolescent mood, sun into clouds into showers into storms into sun again. "You smell," I hear Alex say to Max from the hallway. Max refuses to reply. "You smell like shit," Alex says. "Language!" I cry. "I didn't say a word," Ruby shouts from behind the door of her room. Hangers slide along the rack in her closet, with a sound like one of those tribal musical instruments. Three thumps--shoes, I imagine. Her room always looks as though it has been ransacked. Her father averts his head from the closed door, as though he is imagining what lies within. Her brothers are strictly forbidden to go in there, and, honestly, are not interested. Piles of books, random sweaters, an upended shoulder bag, even the lace panties, given that they belong to their sister--who cares? I am tolerated because I deliver stacks of clean clothes. "Put those away in your drawers," I always say, and she never does. It would be so much easier for me to do it myself, but this standoff has become a part of our relationship, my attempt to teach Ruby responsibility, her attempt to exhibit independence. And so much of our lives together consists of rubbing along, saying things we know will be ignored yet continuing to say them, like background music. Somehow Ruby emerges every morning from the disorder of her room looking beautiful and distinctive: a pair of old Capri pants, a ruffled blouse I bought in college, a long cashmere cardigan with a moth hole in the sleeve, a ribbon tied around her hair. Ruby never looks like anyone else. I admire this and am a little intimidated by it, as though I had discovered we had incompatible blood types. Alex wears a T-shirt and jeans. Max wears a T-shirt and jeans. Max stops to rub the dog's belly when he gets to the kitchen. She narrows her eyes in ecstasy. Her name is Virginia, and she is nine years old. She came as a puppy when the twins were five and Ruby was eight. "Ginger" says the name on the terra-cotta bowl we bought on her first Christmas. Max scratches the base of Ginger's tail. "Now you'll smell like dog," says Alex. The toaster pops with a sound like a toy gun. The refrigerator door closes. I need more toothpaste. Ruby has taken my toothpaste. "I'm going," she yells from the back door. She has not eaten breakfast. She and her friends Rachel and Sarah will stop at the doughnut shop and get iced coffee and jelly doughnuts. Sarah swims competitively and can eat anything. "The metabolism of a hummingbird," says my friend Nancy, who is Sarah's mother, which is convenient for us both. Nancy is a biologist, a professor at the university, so I suppose she should know about metabolism. Rachel is a year older than the other two, and drives them to school. The three of them swear that Rachel drives safely and slowly. I know this isn't true. I picture Rachel, moaning again about some boy she really, really likes but who is insensible to her attentions, steering with one hand, a doughnut in the other, taking a curve with a shrieking sound. Caution and nutrition are for adults. They are young, immortal. "The bus!" Alex yells, and finally Max speaks. This is one of the headlines of our family life: Max speaks. "I'm coming," he mumbles. "Take a sweatshirt," I call. Either they don't hear or they don't care. I can see them with their backpacks getting on the middle-school bus. Alex always goes first. "Do we have any jelly?" Glen asks. He knows where his own things are, but he has amnesia when it comes to community property. "It's where it's always been," I say. "Open your eyes and look." Then I take two jars of jelly off the shelf inside the refrigerator door and thump them on the table in front of him. I can manage only one morning manner, so I treat my husband like one of the children. He doesn't seem to mind or even notice. He likes this moment, when the children have been there but are suddenly gone. The dog comes back into the room, her claws clicking on the tiled floor. "Don't feed her," I say, as I do every morning. In a few minutes, I hear the messy chewing sounds as Ginger eats a crust of English muffin. She makes a circuit of the house, then falls heavily at my feet. After he has read the paper, Glen leaves for the office. He has early appointments one day a week and late ones three evenings, for schoolchildren and people with inflexible jobs. His office is in a small house a block from the hospital. He pulls his car out of the driveway and turns right onto our street every single morning. One day he turned left, and I almost ran out to call to him. I did open the front door, and discovered that a neighbor was retarring the driveway and a steamroller was blocking the road to the right. The neighbor waved. "Sorry for the inconvenience," he called. I waved back. Excerpted from Every Last One by Anna Quindlen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.