Our lady of the prairie

Thisbe Nissen, 1972-

Book - 2018

"A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny's wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile ...husband. Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage. Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election,Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp--a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart"--

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Subjects
Genres
Humorous fiction
Romance fiction
Published
Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Thisbe Nissen, 1972- (author)
Physical Description
357 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781328662071
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

While most marriage stories are concerned with the first flush of wedded life, Nissen's new novel, set during the 2004 Bush-Kerry election, skips straight to the end. "From the moment I saw Lucius Bocelli," the first sentence reads, "I wanted to go to bed with him." One problem: The narrator, 50-year-old Phillipa Maakestad, is already married. Since its origins, the novel has been a form well suited to adultery narratives, but despite Phillipa's insistence that she and Lucius are destined for each other - "Lucius and I collided like a force of nature" - their affair takes up relatively little space in the book and feels curiously secondary. In fact, the driving passion of this novel is not love or desire, but hatred: Phillipa's powerful loathing for her elderly mother-in-law, Bernadette. Phillipa is infuriated by the older woman's refusal to divulge anything about her early life or ancestry, speculating that she is "a Nazi in hiding," living in fear of "being ushered to the gallows at Nuremberg." Later, over the course of a 60-page dream sequence, she imagines Bernadette as a teenager in occupied France, subjected to graphic sexual brutality by a Nazi soldier. The novel can't seem to decide whether this episode is a parable or a revenge fantasy, revealing something that runs much deeper and darker than mere extramarital passion.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 4, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

As a theater professor, it's perhaps only fitting that Phillipa Maakestad seems to crave a certain amount of drama in her life. Her marriage of more than a quarter century is stable, her emotionally troubled daughter, Ginny, is not only on the mend, she is also about to be married, so what better time for Phil to embark on a lusty, midlife love affair with Lucius Boccelli, a history professor she meets while on a teaching exchange program? This isn't some premenopausal, fly-by-night fling; she and Lucius are in L-O-V-E love. Just as they are about to settle into a romantic Paris sabbatical, Phil's soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law, Bernadette, dies back in Iowa, and the loss throws fragile Ginny into a tailspin. Phil returns home to bury Bernadette, ponder the woman's secretive past, and help Ginny through a high-stakes pregnancy. With humor, grace, and honesty, Nissen's three heroines ride an emotional roller coaster as they reconcile their respective pasts, ride out a turbulent present, and, hopefully, secure a more serene future.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist

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

Nissen (Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night) relies too heavily on authorial gymnastics in her latest, which explores what happens in middle-aged theater professor Phillipa Maakestad's life after she falls in love and decides to blow up her marriage. The tornado that subsequently roars through town and disrupts the wedding of her emotionally fragile daughter, Ginny, at the once-Catholic Our Lady of the Prairie Church is a metaphor for the ensuing emotional chaos. Phillipa's attempts to reclaim control-allowing her husband to spank her, handling her daughter's hostility about the affair-are less than successful. Meanwhile, she becomes obsessed with proving that her belligerent European mother-in-law collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, and her decision to volunteer for John Kerry's 2004 presidential run is a dramatic distraction she does not need. Nissen excels at capturing her protagonist as a woman on the edge-the elation, the sex, the emotional roller coaster, the questionable choices. But the mother-in-law subplot is too much for the narrative to support. It affords Nissen the chance to spin a self-contained, creative, and ironic 58-page fantasy, but Phillipa's fixation remains nebulous. Is it a diversionary tactic against the circus her life has become, or a sign that she has lost touch with the people around her? This big question mark overshadows the book's other elements, resulting in an intriguing yet uneven story. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Longtime theater professor Phillipa -Maakestad is in Ohio teaching for the spring semester when she meets and falls in love with Lucius Bocelli. It's too bad she's already married to Michael-and has been for 26 years-sharing the responsibility of teaching in the theater department at the University of Iowa and raising a difficult daughter in their quiet Midwestern home. After weeks of mind-blowing passion in Ohio, Phil leaves to return to her prairie home for her daughter's nuptials to a former Amish man, Silas. It's springtime in the Midwest and prime season for a tornado to rip through the fields on the day of the wedding. Meanwhile, Phil pretends to be one half of an untroubled couple and deals with her exasperating and possible Nazi collaborator mother-in-law. A metaphorical tornado is sweeping through Phil's fine-but-staid life and upending everything she's built in the past three decades. VERDICT Investigating dysfunction and cynicism with humor, -Nissen -(Osprey Island) writes a descriptive novel filled with vulnerable and complicated characters who are often all too human. [See Prepub Alert, 8/2/17.]--Melissa Keegan, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL © Copyright 2017. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Against the backdrop of the Bush-Kerry election, an Iowa Democrat has a midlife crisis that gives the tornadoes that rip through the state a run for their money.The timing of Phillipa Maakestad's decision to tell her husband about her passionate affair is unfortunatethe two theater professors are due to play parents of the bride at their daughter Ginny's wedding to a wonderful Amish boy. The responsibility is torqued by the facts that his parents, who were close friends of Phillipa's, were killed when an SUV hit their buggy and raising Ginny has been like a scene out of The Exorcist. Bulimic, addicted, promiscuous, filled with rageGinny has touched all the bases. After they get through the (literal) tornado that strikes the wedding, the Ginny problem is finally solved, though not for long. And by then, Phillipa herself has gone off the rails, living in a cheap motel, phoning in her classes, and freaking out about the election. If the author did not intend the Bush-era political ravings to be alienating, she overshot the mark. "Passing the monstrous W barn on 26, I wanted to drive up onto the grass, get out of my car, and hammer on the door, shouting How do you live with yourselves? Why not put up an I'm a Greedy Bigot sign?'" Then, after a flash of self-awareness (I sound like Ginny! she thinks), she returns to form. "The miserable world into which I brought my own miserable child, now a miserable adult, fully aware and sickened to the marrow of her bones by the injustice of this godforsaken place, and as wholly incapable as her pathetic mother to do a goddamn thing about it. About anything. How does anyone with a consciencedo anything but cry, all day every day, navigating this godforsaken world." This sort of thing, combined with random classist commentson the baby of a woman she drives to the polls: "Travis: a name destined for the meth den"seems designed to make the reader hate liberals. Throw in church-sign puns and musicals you can't get out of your head and a whole mininovel about Nazis in Francewhew.At first, Nissen's narrator (Osprey Island, 2004, etc.) seems clever and voluble, so daring with her spanking-scene opener, but eventually she wears a bit thin. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

My Husband Was Dresden From the moment I saw Lucius Bocelli I wanted to go to bed with him. If I'd known then what Michael would put me through by way of penanc​e--in twenty-six years of marriage you'd think if he'd so badly needed to spank me he'd've found an opportunity--​I might have simply given in. Instead I spent three months in tortuous longing before succumbing to all I felt for Lucius. But retrospect is convenient, life less so. Even if I should have foreseen--or already known of--my husband's peccadilloes, I still could not have gazed into the future to know, say, the path that May's tornado would take across Iowa, straight through our daughter's wedding. I met Lucius in late January. I'd just arrived in Ohio for my semester's teaching exchange; he was recently back from a year and a half in France, a research sabbatical he'd extended with an additional six-month leave. His work was on Nazi collaborationists of the Vichy regime, and he'd be headed back to France that summer, but when we met it was only January. The Democrats hadn't even nominated someone to run against Dubya and bar him from a second term. Bernadette--the mother-in-law whose belligerent existence I'd suffered for more than half my life--​was still alive and kicking me at every available opportunity, and Ginny wasn't yet married to Silas Yoder, or pregnant and off her psych meds and once again as miserable as she'd been before the electroshock. Orah and Obadiah Yoder were already dead--​Silas and Eula's parents, hit head-on and killed by an SUV, in their own buggy in front of their own Prairie farm--and a year had done little to dissipate that pain. The birth of Eula's baby had diverted us, yes. My point is this: when I met Lucius my life was more stable than it had been in twenty-five years. I met him, and I wanted him--​more clearly, and maybe less complicatedly, than I think I have ever wanted anything in this life. There'd been a reading at the U of O--a progressive political commentator--with a gathering afterward at the dean's home, for the obligatory university-issue cheese-and-cracker platters and a Midwestern supermarket arrangement of crudité: concentric moats of gray-tinged cauliflower, parched baby carrots, and inedibly mushy grape tomatoes surrounding the ranch dip bowl. Guests represented the left of the U of O faculty, and there was a collective relief at being surrounded by other sane people at a time when the main--hell, the only --​​criteria for sanity were (a) abject terror at the state of the union, and (b) downright hatred of the president, who had about as much ability to run the country as one of our thickheaded, eighteen-year-old frat boys. And less humility, which is almost inconceivable. The wine flowed that night, and it was lousy, but it was on the U, so we drank with zeal. In Ohio, at the end of January, four-foot snowbanks turning the campus into a giant ice maze, you drink what's offered, and you're grateful. I'd gotten a lift to the dean's house from Anthea Lingafelter, a Romanticist. As we entered, I saw, leaning in the arch of the foyer, a man I took instantly to be the actor Ed Harris. I'd like to imagine my next thought would have been, What the hell is Ed Harris doing here? , but Anthea had paused to make introductions and my hand was already extended as I heard her say, "Phillipa Maakestad--on loan to us--Theater." I was beaming a sort of I-thought- Pollock -was-brilliant smile when it seemed that, of this man whose hand I was shaking, Anthea was saying, "Lucius Bocelli, History." His expression mutated from pleased-to-meet-you to perplexity. I'd been holding his hand far longer than appropriate and dropped it abruptly, jerking away. A step behind my own actions, the soundtrack of my brain was out of sync with the picture. I shook hands with the others in the group, registering nothing. Then Anthea guided me away toward a den, slipping her parka onto a futon couch where coats were being piled. "I thought he was Ed Harris!" I told her. Anthea glanced back, her look inscrutable to me, and said, "Lucius?" When I made a face to say, Yes, the Ed Harris look-alike, who else? , she lifted her chin and let out a hoot--​​a hoot that only became clear much later when Lucius told me of the affair they'd had years before. Anthea's divorce, I will note, was not on Lucius's account. I encountered Lucius minutes later on line at the makeshift bar. He came up behind me. "The wine's no good," he said, "but it makes the socializing go down easier." I was conscious of my own breath--I heard it like the rush of wind through a tunnel--and I'm not a woman often conscious of her own breath. "I'm so sorry." I lifted my hand toward the site of our introduction. "I thought you were Ed Harris." I shook my head in castigation for my absurdity. A smile spread across his face, crinkling his eyes, and I saw he was older than I'd realized. For no reason I can understand, it was this that hit my pelvis: realization of his age somehow turned my breathless giddiness into grave desire. Lucius's eyes--​​pale, pale blue--were deeply set, corners striated with wrinkles, the skin there thin and tissuey as parchment. I had to physically restrain myself from lifting my hand to run a thumb across that delicacy. His face was so hard and sculpted it made that thin-thin skin at the corners of his eyes seem all the more fragile, their sadness devastatingly palpable. To see him smile felt like a triumph, and I may have known then that I would love this man with a ferocity, and an urgency, and a gravity I had never experienced before. He dropped his chin, tucked it to his neck, and peered at me as if over reading glasses he wasn't actually wearing. "I suspect," he said, "you just can't tell one bald man from another." "Come on," I said, "it's not like I mistook you for Danny DeVito." His grin broke wide again ​-- ​the shine of those sad, deep-set eyes. He conceded my point. "Or Gandhi," I said. "No," he said thoughtfully, mock-thoughtfully. "No, not Gandhi." "Bruce Willis . . . Telly Savalis . . . Yule Brynner . . ." "Now you're talking really bald--I have my scruff." He fluffed at his hair. "My tufts." "Which," I pointed out, "is why I thought you were Ed Harris and got a bit tongue-tied." Lucius looked suddenly disappointed. He'd glanced at my left hand: "You're married." Without thinking, I shifted my hands on my hips to cover my knuckles, absurdly hiding the ring he'd already seen. "You?" I asked. He tipped back his plastic glass, drained its dregs, stuck it in the underarm crook of his blazer, and held his hands out as though I'd asked to inspect his fingernails. Because of the cup, one arm was hitched up shorter than the other, his back bent as if in halfhearted Igor impersonation. His fingernails were clean, cut short, healthy pink, and he had small hands, downy with grayed hair I could tell had once been golden blond. They made me think of lifeguards on the California beaches of my childhood--muscled hands, thick-veined, wiry like the rest of him; he's sinewy and compact as a greyhound. He wore no ring. "Thrice was plenty," he said, then straightened and caught his cup as it fell. I'd be lying to say I wasn't alarmed. Three marriages? But he was so forthcoming, and emotion overrode skepticism. I was already in love, and reconciled the question instantly. One failed marriage in this era barely warrants mention; at our age, two is hardly surprising. Three, though, calls for a story: a brief starter marriage, maybe, then a long-term one, ending in her death--cancer ​--and then an awful, grief-spurred, six-month catastrophe. That's what I imagined. "Kids?" I asked, and I'd like to think if he had more than, say, four--or any were still underage--I would have run, but I'd probably have found a way to reconcile that, too. He was nodding. "Two, from my second marriage. Jesus, they're middle-aged," he said sheepishly. "Hannah and Tim. Both married. Kids of their own who aren't even kids anymore." He laid it out like he was coming clean. "Grandkids--​​how old are you?" I'd assumed he was maybe Michael's age, sixtyish. Lucius chuckled. "Put it this way: I'm Medicare-eligible." "You are not." His lips closed in a knowing line. "Oh, yes. Indeed I am. And yourself?" "Fifty," I told him. "And the rest?" My eyes felt extraordinarily wide. I dropped my hands and faced him like a refugee. Like someone with nothing left to lose, which wasn't the case at all. "One daughter, Ginny. Twenty-five. Getting married in May." It was so easy to say. Just like that, I'd practically written Ginny a new life story ​-- ​leapt over years of hospital corridors and caloric mandates, meth dens and court orders, razor blades and electroconvulsive shock ​-- ​flew over it all and announced that I had a daughter about to be married. It wasn't a lie; it was entirely true ​-- ​and it was glorious. Excerpted from Our Lady of the Prairie by Thisbe Nissen 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.