Still life with bread crumbs A novel

Review by New York Times Review

THERE COMES A MOMENT in every novelist's career when she sloughs off the weight of the past - the conventions and obsessions, the stylistic fallbacks and linguistic tics, the influence of early masters - and ventures into new territory, breaking free into a marriage of tone and style, of plot and characterization, that's utterly her own. Anna Quindlen's marvelous romantic comedy of manners is just such a book. In "Still Life With Bread Crumbs," Quindlen achieves something distinctive, a feminist novel for a post-feminist age. Here she takes up a subject too rarely seen in contemporary fiction (not to mention contemporary Hollywood): the life of a woman who would once have been characterized as "of a certain age." At 60, Quindlen's complicated heroine, Rebecca Winter, is strong of body and mind, much less so of heart and bank account. In her late 30s, Rebecca made her name with a series of photographs chronicling her domestic life, which were taken up as landmarks of feminist art. The most famous image in the series, "Still Life With Bread Crumbs," featured "a vaguely Flemish composition of dirty wineglasses, stacked plates, the torn ends of two baguettes, and a dish towel singed at one corner by the gas stove." Reproduced on postcards, T-shirts and posters, it brought Rebecca unexpected fame. "For years she had lived off it and its satellites, the reprints and licensing, as well as its free-floating reputation.... It had paid her restaurant bills and her hairdresser tips and she hadn't even really noticed how much money it brought in until it started to dry up and then disappeared." Now all Rebecca has to show for that early success - and the popular work that came afterward, abstract images of her son, Ben - is the beautiful apartment, overlooking Central Park, that she bought with the proceeds. Her marriage to a caddish academic (at present ensconced with his fourth wife) dissolved long ago in the face of her fame. Her creativity also seems to have fled. "Ironically, great success made Rebecca less and less sure of herself, until everything she produced, even the successful things she produced, seemed like something she'd done before." Her son once jokingly referred to her as "the artist formerly known as Rebecca Winter." In desperation, if not outright panic, she has sublet the apartment - "her true home, her beloved home, or, as her accountant called it, her greatest illiquid asset" - at the "accepted exorbitant New York rate" and rented a dilapidated cottage in the countryside far north of Manhattan for a fraction of the price, in the hopes that she can pull herself together, both financially and artistically. But the calm and quiet unnerve rather than settle her: "She didn't find it peaceful in the least, more like the TV with the mute button pressed on the remote. Empty." She finds herself "doing math in her mind, the math she did almost every day. Fifty-eight hundred for subletting the apartment, minus 1,000 for renting the cottage; 1,400 for the maintenance on the apartment." At night she lies in her lumpy, rented bed, trying to imagine herself finding a normal job, "managing a coffee shop, raising money for a hospital, anything with a regular paycheck. An office. She'd never worked in a real office." So pervasive is her worry that when she spies a bald eagle in the woods, "the shock of recognition was powerful; he looked exactly like money." But Rebecca's crisis is, ultimately, more existential than financial. Marriage and motherhood had fueled her work, trained her eye. The power of those early photographs came from rage, rage at her pompous husband, rage at herself for being misled into the sort of conventional marriage that involves staying home and cooking complicated French stews, then falling asleep on the couch, leaving behind a flotilla of dirty dishes. The Kitchen Counter series "was seen as an iconic moment in women's art. But in fact at the time she took those photographs Rebecca had just been tired, tired in that way a woman with a child and a husband and a house and a job and a life gets tired, so that it feels like a mild chronic illness." Now, for the first time, she needs to make her own way, both professionally and personally. She needs to produce art in order to live. That she does so comes as no surprise, but the manifold pleasures of this novel lie less in its turns of plot - and in the male companionship she may ultimately find - than in the wit and charm with which the story unfolds. In previous novels, Quindlen has often employed first-person narration - to particularly great effect in her harrowing 1998 best seller, "Black and Blue," a pitch-perfect account of a woman's flight from her brutal, abusive husband - but here she has wisely adopted a wry, omniscient approach, moving back and forth in time. ("'Peter is so European,' women would say, and later Rebecca wondered if that was their way of telling her that he slept around. But that was later.") Quindlen's previous novels have often taken their subjects from her concerns as a reporter and columnist, for this newspaper and for Newsweek magazine. Her coverage of what can generally be defined as women's issues was no less trailblazing than Rebecca Winter's fictional photographs. When Quindlen's Public and Private appeared in The Times, she became only the third woman to write a regular column for the paper's Op-Ed page; hers was among the first voices chronicling the everyday challenges of American women. Taken as a whole, Quindlen's writings represent a generous and moving interrogation of women's experience across the lines of class and race. But her earlier novels - earnest and passionate as they are, demonstrating both heart and intellect - lack the qualities that have defined Quindlen's columns: humor and economy. Not so "Still Life With Bread Crumbs," which proves all the more moving because of its light, sophisticated humor. Quindlen's least overtly political novel, it packs perhaps the most serious punch. In her lovely 1998 book, "How Reading Changed My Life," Quindlen recalls reading Mary McCarthy's "The Group" for the first time: "Kay's suicide ... the sad settling that Dorothy makes of her life after her one sexual adventure.... the lives of intelligent women had to amount to more than this." In her new novel - a comedy in the style of Austen rather than a tragedy in that of McCarthy - she ultimately offers her heroine a life that amounts to much, a way to save both herself and someone else. In doing so, Quindlen has delivered a novel that will have staying power all its own. Anna Quindlen's comedy of manners is a feminist novel for a post-feminist age. JOANNA RAKOFF is the author of the novel "A Fortunate Age." Her memoir, "My Salinger Year," will be published in June.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 9, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

Rebecca Winter was once a famous photographer, and, with any luck, she will be again. Having achieved surprising early success with her feminist Kitchen Counter collection, Rebecca, now 60, finds herself on fame and fortune's flip side. With her former torrent of royalties dwindling to a trickle, Rebecca has been forced to give up her perfect Manhattan apartment for a paltry upstate cabin, and with marauding raccoons, stray dogs, and trigger-happy hunters, life in the country is proving to be no walk in Central Park. Luckily, Rebecca still has her camera, and she soon finds inspiration for new work in unexpected places, often in the company of a bird-watching roofer named Jim, whose quiet companionship proves to be just the balm she needs to fully embrace her unfamiliar surroundings. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and star in the pantheon of domestic fiction (Every Last One, 2010), Quindlen presents instantly recognizable characters who may be appealingly warm and nonthreatening, but that only serves to drive home her potent message that it's never too late to embrace life's second chances.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Quindlen will hit the road with her latest novel, backed by a mammoth media promotional campaign.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Quindlen's seventh novel, following Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, is a detailed exploration of creativity and the need for connection. Rebecca Winter is a 60-year-old photographer, once revered as a feminist icon, whose work isn't selling as briskly as it used to. She needs a fresh start after her marriage falls apart because her husband trades her in for a younger model (as he does every 10 years). She rents a cabin in the country while subletting her beloved New York City apartment, needing both the money and the space in which to find her creative spark again. Jim Bates, a local roofer who helps her with the challenges of moving into the cottage, becomes a new friend, as does a dog that seems to prefer living with her rather than with its neglectful owner. Rebecca also finds new objects to photograph in the series of homemade wooden crosses she discovers during hikes in the surrounding woods, without realizing their connection to a tragedy in Jim's life. Quindlen has always excelled at capturing telling details in a story, and she does so again in this quiet, powerful novel, showing the charged emotions that teem beneath the surface of daily life. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Quindlen's (Every Last One) latest novel features Rebecca Winter, an award-winning photographer in her 60s who is seemingly at the end of a lucrative career. Rebecca has lived for years on royalties from some very successful photographs. Like many of her fellow baby boomers, she is balancing the need to support her elderly parents and help her son get established while dealing with a diminishing income. To save money, she rents out her pricey Manhattan apartment and moves to a shabby rental cottage in rural New York State. This move unexpectedly reinvigorates both her personal life and her photography. Carrington MacDuffie is a polished and effective narrator. -verdict Recommended for all public libraries. ["With spare, elegant prose, [Quindlen] crafts a poignant glimpse into the inner life of an aging woman," read the review of the Random hc," LJ 11/1/13.]-Mary Knapp, -Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2014. 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.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A photographer retreats to a rustic cottage, where she confronts aging and flagging career prospects. Rebecca Winter is known for her Kitchen Counter series, black-and-white photographs capturing domestic minutia, taken as her marriage to a philandering Englishman is foundering on the shoals of mistaken assumptions. But, as her laconic and un-nurturing agent, TG, never fails to remind her, what has she done lately? Her photo royalties are in precipitous decline. Divorced, living in a high-priced Manhattan apartment, Rebecca, 60, finds herself unmoored. Her filmmaker son, Ben, still requires checks from Mom. Her mother, Bebe, is in the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm, where she spends her days playing piano pieces on any available surface, except an actual piano. Since the collapse of the family business, Rebecca has supported both her parents and now pays Bebe's nursing home bills. She figures that it will be cheaper to sublet her apartment and rent a ramshackle woodland cabin upstate than to continue to ape the NYC lifestyle of her formerly successful self. She meets the usual eccentrics who people so many fictional small towns, although in Quindlen's hands, these archetypes are convincingly corporeal. Sarah runs the English-themed Tea for Two cafe, not exactly to the taste of most locals. Until Rebecca came to town, Sarah's only regular was Tad, exboy soprano, now working clown. Sarah's ne'er-do-well husband, Kevin, sells Rebecca subpar firewood and is admonished by Jim, an upstanding local hero. After helping Rebecca remove a marauding raccoon, Jim helps her find work photographing wild birds. Like Rebecca, Jim is divorced and has onerous family responsibilities, in his case, his bipolar sister who requires constant surveillance. As Rebecca interacts with these townsfolk--and embarks on a new photo series--she begins to understand how provisional her former life--and self--really was. Occasionally profound, always engaging, but marred by a formulaic resolution in which rewards and punishments are meted out according to who ranks highest on the niceness scale.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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9781400065752|excerpt Quindlen / STILL LIFE WITH BREAD CRUMBS No Outlets A few minutes after two in the morning Rebecca Winter woke to the sound of a gunshot and sat up in bed. Well, to be completely accurate, she had no idea what time it was. When she had moved into the ramshackle cottage in a hollow halfway up the mountain, it had taken her two days to realize that there was a worrisome soft spot in the kitchen floor, a loose step out to the backyard, and not one electrical outlet in the entire bedroom. She stood, turning in a circle, her old alarm clock in her hand trailing its useless tail of a cord, as though, like some magic spell, a few rotations and some muttered curses would lead to a place to plug it in. Like much of what constituted Rebecca's life at that moment, the clock had been with her far past the time when it was current or useful. Later she would wonder why she had never owned one of those glow-in-the-dark battery-operated digital clocks, the ones available so cheaply at the Walmart squatting aggressively just off the highway a half hour north of town. But that was later. As for the gunshot: Rebecca Winter had no idea what a gunshot actually sounded like. She had grown up almost entirely in New York City, on the west side of Manhattan, with vacations on the shores of Long Island and the occasional foray to Provence or Tuscany. These were the usual vacations of the people she knew. Everyone always talked about how marvelous those places were, how beautiful the beaches, how splendid the vineyards. Marvelous, they said, rolling the word around in their mouths the way her husband, Peter, did with that first tasting of wine, pretending he knew more about it than he did, occasionally sending a bottle back to make a point. But for her family, which she had felt when she was a child hardly deserved the name, being composed of only a father, a mother, and a single child, the trips were never pleasant. Her parents were deeply suspicious of anything that smacked of nature; her mother was almost pathologically afraid of bugs, was always calling down to the doorman to deal with spiders or recalcitrant bees sneaking in from the park outside. Her father had various pollen allergies and from March until October carried an enormous handkerchief, like a white flag of surrender for his sinuses. Certainly it did happen from time to time that there would be a noise on Central Park West or Riverside Drive or Broadway, and someone might say, Was that a gunshot? This happened especially during that period after Rebecca graduated from college, when it was agreed by people who would never dream of living elsewhere that the city, dangerous and dirty, was becoming unlivable. It was always eventually decided that the gunshot was a car backfire, or a bottle being smashed, or a door slamming to the building's basement, where the trash was stored. This was always, without fail, true. Nevertheless Rebecca was almost certain that it was a gunshot that had awakened her now as she lay stiffly in the bed in the room without outlets. She tried to look at her watch, but it was a small flat gold watch, like a superannuated dime, that her parents had given her when she married, as though her marriage was a retirement of some kind. It had the initials R.W.S. on the back, what her mother called her new monogram, although Rebecca had never changed her name. Still, she had great sentimental attachment to the watch, mainly because of her father, who had selected it and had taken an enormous amount of pleasure in giving it to her. "That's a beauty!" he said when she removed it from the mahogany box. "It's not waterproof," her mother added. Under the best of conditions it was a difficult watch to read, never mind now, in a bedroom fringed with large pine trees and with the heavy cloud cover of a muggy May night, a thunderstorm moving in overhead. The room was so dark you could not see your hand in front of you. To test this, Rebecca held her hand in front of her, where it glimmered whitely, faintly. She could see it, but just barely. She was not sleeping soundly in the strange bed, which had a well in the center into which she fell whenever she rolled over, a well like the one used for drainage along the side of the road. Rebecca still didn't know the name of the road the cottage was on. It was the second right off 547. That's all she knew. Then the driveway past the pump house. What did the pump house pump? She had said it aloud as she turned in. No answer. Who lives in a house on a road whose name she does not know? Who moves into a place she has seen only in flattering photographs on the Internet? It reminded her of what she had heard a woman telling a friend at the next table when she was waiting to have lunch with an art book editor. "You walk in and you can't pick them out at the bar because they look nothing like their picture on the website," the woman had said. "Nothing. Not. A. Thing." The cottage was the real estate version of online dating, built atop lies, leading downhill to disenchantment. Or capitulation. "We were so happy here," the owner had said in an email, attaching a photo of two men with their arms around one another in front of a large tree. They were so happy here, and then they left, and took all the comfortable furniture with them, and replaced it with bits and pieces from the Salvation Army. A true child of New York, Rebecca thought she felt the bites of bedbugs. She rolled over and fell into the well in the mattress, the gunshot just a memory, perhaps only an illusion. It was quiet now. There was a smell. There were so many smells. Mildew, damp linen, trampled plants. The bananas in the glass bowl on the drainboard. A whiff of what might be skunk, or skunk cabbage. In the backyard she had taken a deep breath. It had smelled as though the entire forest around her was rotting by inches. She sniffed audibly, or it would have been audible if there had been anyone to hear. Rebecca was entirely alone. She told herself that she was surprised she wasn't more frightened by the sound of the gunshot. In truth she was terrified but her body acknowledged the fear without her mind's concurrence, the way she had developed a bad back after her divorce when she was absolutely sure she was getting along fine. Instead of pajamas she was wearing an old T-shirt that commemorated an exhibition of daguerreotypes at the New-York Historical Society and a pair of very old cotton panties. Her legs were like walking sticks beneath the wool blanket, stiff and tense. The quiet of the country was unnerving. She didn't find it peaceful in the least, more like the TV with the mute button pressed on the remote. Empty. Her cellphone would not work in the house. Neither would her computer. She had made a terrible mistake. That was her conclusion even before the nominal gunshot, and then the noise overhead that followed. It sounded like an elevated subway train making a turn while going too fast. Or like a drawerful of heavy silverware being emptied into a large metal bucket. Or like the pots-and-pans cabinet of a kitchen when the contents are stacked precariously and the door is opened unthinkingly. Benjamin had loved to sit on the floor and play with the lids. "Are we certain those were washed thoroughly?" her husband would say drily. Peter was English. He said everything drily. He never offered to wash the lids, and Rebecca never thought to suggest it. She was the daughter of her father, an avatar of peace at any price. The train or the silver or the pots or whatever it was overhead crashed again, and again. The smell grew stronger. Rebecca sat up further, with some difficulty, and looked toward the ceiling. She felt as though it might come down around her, blanketing her with plaster and lath, a snowstorm of ceiling. She could see herself in her mind's eye, the flimsy blue blanket covered with chunks of white and wood. "Fully furnished" the ad for the cottage had said. Ha. Two bedrooms, one blanket, and not a good one, either. She of all people, to be seduced by a series of photographs, snapshots really, none of the kitchen and bath, two of the view. That should have been the tip-off, that vista of trees with what looked like a stream snaking through them in the distance. You couldn't sleep in the view, or take a hot shower in it, or make coffee. Nor could you do any of those in this godforsaken house. Fully furnished. Four forks. Not a gunshot, she realized suddenly, recalling the events of the day. She must have been sleeping more soundly than she thought not to have realized what was happening above her. She reconstructed it as best she could, given her utter ignorance of the situation. First a wire trap snapping shut hard as the lever was tripped with a sound like a gunshot. Now the noise of an angry animal thrashing around in the trap, turning the metal cage over and over like an amusement park ride. Bam bam bam. Finally she was certain she had gotten it right. As for the smell, her imagination failed her. She made a faint sound, somewhere between a prayer, an exclamation, and an obscenity. Skitter skitter skitter. That's how it had started. "There's something in my attic," she had told the exterminator in town, but he was too busy with a tick outbreak at the nursing home. (False alarm: a squashed engorged mosquito on the top sheet of a woman with an excitable niece.) Instead he'd suggested Rebecca call a roofer. "If you got something in your attic, it's because you got some way into your attic," said the exterminator, who was wearing a T-shirt that said you bug me, except that the bug was an image of an insect and not a printed word. "No point me getting it out, then you having to call somebody anyhow to fix the hole." "There's something in my attic," she had told the roofer. He'd stood on a metal ladder as the sunlight faltered in late afternoon, a small flashlight in one hand. "Would you like me to hold the ladder?" Rebecca had asked. "I spend a lot of time up on ladders," he'd said, shifting the flashlight to his other hand. "Is there a hatch in your hall?" "Pardon?" Rebecca had said. "Well, we've got two related problems here," he'd said when he emerged from the attic crawl space through the hatch in the hall. "The first is that there's a coon living up there. The second is that he's got easy access and egress. There's a corner of your flashing with a big hole in it. He's climbing that pine tree in the back and using the hole to get in. I don't think he's got a way out of the attic and down into the house. No scat, right?" "I don't believe so," Rebecca had said vaguely. The roofer's conversation was full of mysteries. What precisely was flashing? Scat she thought she had divined from context. The idea that a raccoon was living above her was deeply unsettling. "Oh, you'd know," the roofer had said. Rebecca couldn't remember his name. He was big, with fair hair and a ruddy tone to his skin. His eyelashes and eyebrows were so light they were practically invisible. There was a line of pink skin along his part as he bent his head to put the flashlight in his tool bag. The exterminator had recommended him. "Roofers are thieves," he'd said. Apparently this one was not a thief. He'd taken a card from a banged-up metal case in his back pocket. Rebecca thought his hands cried out to be photographed. They had light hair on the backs, and were covered with scars--small lines, larger circles, a big snaky one that was a pale pink and covered the side of his palm. On his left hand his index finger was missing the last joint. In black-and-white the scars would be more prominent, Rebecca knew, the hairs a kind of faint cross-hatching. "Bates Roofing," the card said. "Family Owned Since 1934." Grandfather, father, son. Someday this man would be too old to climb a ladder and a young fair-haired man would show up to check the flashing in his stead. By then she would be long gone. Maybe by next month she would be long gone. Her apartment in the city had been sublet for a year. She'd signed a lease for the cottage for a year, too. She sighed and let her eyes close. An uncomfortable bed, a room with no outlets, a raccoon overhead. Surely she could get a visiting position at a college in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago. Someplace where a super worried about the condition of the flashing, whatever flashing was. "Give me a minute," the roofer had said, opening the back of his truck. He'd baited the trap with one of her bananas. He'd wanted peanut butter, but she had none in the house. In the refrigerator there was cream cheese, two bagels she'd brought from the city now hardening into a food artifact, a six-pack of Diet Coke, a cold chicken, and some lettuce. In the pantry there was canned soup and tuna fish and a half loaf of bread with a faint rime of mold around the edge of the last slice. She had to find a supermarket, she thought as he put the baited trap into the attic. The trap, she thought now, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Overhead the crashing stopped, then started again. She lay in bed in the unyielding darkness wondering what time it was, whether it was too early to get up. (It was 2:08, too early to get up.) The roofer's card was on the kitchen counter, next to a list: bottle opener. Scissors. Trash bags. Spaghetti. He'd said to call if she thought the trap had been sprung. "How will I be certain?" she'd asked. "You'll know," he'd said. He'd been right. The trap had been sprung, in her muscles, her nerves, her fingertips, the soles of her feet. The house was nothing but the darkness, the odors, and the noise of a trapped raccoon thrashing his way from one end of the attic to another. Maybe the roofer was imagining all that when he'd looked at her and added, "You know what? I'll just stop back in the morning in case we get him overnight. Let's hope it's not a mom with a couple of babies." Was the roofer's name Joe? There was a long silence, and she shut her eyes. Then the crashing began again. It sounded as though it was over the living room now. How did I wind up here? Rebecca thought. How on earth did I wind up here? Excerpted from Still Life with Bread Crumbs 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.

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