Coral Glynn
Peter Cameron, 2012
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250024138
Summary
Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House, an isolated manse in the English countryside, early in the very wet spring of 1950, to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart, who is dying of cancer.
Hart House is also inhabited by Mrs. Prence, the perpetually disgruntled housekeeper, and Major Clement Hart, Mrs. Hart’s war-ravaged son, who is struggling to come to terms with his latent homosexuality.
When a child’s game goes violently awry in the woods surrounding Hart House, a great shadow—love, perhaps—descends upon its inhabitants. Like the misguided child’s play, other seemingly random events—a torn dress, a missing ring, a lost letter—propel Coral and Clement into the dark thicket of marriage.
A period novel observed through a refreshingly gimlet eye, Coral Glynn explores how quickly need and desire can blossom into love, and just as quickly transform into something less categorical. Borrowing from themes and characters prevalent in the work of mid-twentieth-century British women writers, Peter Cameron examines how we live and how we love—with his customary empathy and wit. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Pequannock Township, New Jersey, USA; London, England, UK
• Education—B.A. from Hamilton College
• Currently—Lives in New York City, New York, USA
Cameron grew up in the Pompton Plains section of Pequannock Township, New Jersey, and in London, England. He spent two years attending the progressive American School in London, where he discovered the joys of reading, and began writing stories, poems, and plays. Cameron graduated from Hamilton College in New York State in 1982 with a B.A. in English literature.
Non-writing career
After arriving in New York City in 1982, Cameron worked for a year in the subsidiary rights department of St. Martin’s Press. Upon realizing he did not want to pursue a career in publishing, he began doing administrative work for non-profit organizations. From 1983 to 1988, he worked for the Trust for Public Land, a land-conservation organization, and from 1990 to 1998 he worked for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a legal organization that protects and extends the civil rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS. In 1987 he taught writing at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and from 1990–1996 he taught in the MFA program at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. From 1998 to 2005 he taught in Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program. He taught at Yale University in the fall of 2005.
Writing career
Cameron sold his first short story to The New Yorker in 1983, and published ten more stories in that magazine during the next few years. This exposure facilitated the publication of his first book, a collection of stories titled One Way or Another, published in 1986. One Way or Another was awarded a special citation by the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Book of Fiction.
In 1988, Cameron was hired by Adam Moss to write a serial novel for the just-launched magazine, 7 Days. This serial, which was written and published a chapter a week, became Leap Year, a comic novel of life and love in New York City in the twilight of the 1980s. It was published in 1989 and was followed by a second collection of stories, Far-flung, in 1991.
Beginning in 1990, Cameron stopped writing short fiction and turned his attention toward novels. His second novel, The Weekend, was published in 1994 and his third, Andorra, in 1997. The City of Your Final Destination, came out in 2002. Another novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September 2007. His latest novel, Coral Glynn, was also published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2012. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.
Cameron counts among his strongest influences the novels of British women writers such as Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Penelope Mortimer, and Elizabeth Taylor. He admires these writers for their elegant and accomplished use of language and their penetrating and sensitive exploration of personal life. He also admires the writing of the late William Maxwell for its natural elegance and deeply felt humanity. Shirley Hazzard, James Salter, and Denton Welch are also revered. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
There is an ancient class of vessels, found in Roman tombs, called lachrymatories: tiny glass flasks, often shaped like tears, into which mourners are said to have collected the spill of their weeping eyes. This entrancing image flitted through my mind as I read Peter Cameron's new novel, Coral Glynn. By the end of this sad, beautiful, absorbing story of love missed, love lost, love found, I was thinking that this must be what it's like to slip into a bath of hot tears.
New York Times Book Review
Like its packaging, Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn is spare and unassuming. Mr. Cameron announces his talent in the way that matters: by telling a riveting tale with an often heartbreakingly pure prose style.... Though American, Mr. Cameron is presenting an updated version of the classic English novel of manners, with its themes of balked love and painfully polite misunderstandings. Every timorous gesture points to some profound psychological fear.... Scenes unfold with the exquisite design of a one-act play, with props skillfully deployed to comic and poignant effect.... [Cameron’s] writing...is bracingly unvarnished and unsentimental, stripped of pity or condescension. It is as though he has set an X-ray machine before the traditional English drawing room, leaving its demure occupants exposed in their loneliness and well-meant follies—and revealing them as movingly human.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Peter Cameron [is] an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer.... The plots, the ventures, the encounters of his characters, instead of taking them from point A to point B, abduct them into unintended and more expansive itineraries.
Richard Eder - Boston Globe
A big, dark house in the English countryside, with its brooding, damaged master; the pretty but gawky young woman who comes to work there—and to stumble over secrets in gloomy hallways: These are the elements of an old-fashioned gothic tale, and also of Peter Cameron’s lovely, enigmatic new novel, Coral Glynn.... There’s a way stories like this are supposed to go, and Coral Glynn both does and doesn’t play by the old rules.... Coral Glynn is a tribute to a certain breed of novel most often written by British women in the mid-20th century: astringently unsentimental, disciplined, replete with half-acknowledged emotions moving like the shadows of alarmingly large fish deep beneath the surface of the sea. Because their own time preferred to valorize a more chest-thumping sort of writer, their brilliance has been almost forgotten. Some, like Muriel Spark, never entirely slipped from view. Others, like Elizabeth Taylor, are just now being revived. There’s a dash of Daphne du Maurier here, too, and a touch of the sublime Barbara Pym.... Like Cameron’s novels, these books have won a following that makes up in tenacity for what it lacks in size. The audience for both keeps on growing, one devoted reader at a time.
Laura Miller - Salon
Coral comes across a young girl tied to a tree. She’s being pelted with pinecones by a young boy in a game they call Prisoner. Though she insists they stop, Coral takes no other action; the young girl is later murdered in the same forest; and suspicion—bizarrely—falls upon Coral. The book is suffused with a lonely sadness and an aura of the surreal, and the many dramatic events in Coral’s life are entirely plausible thanks to Cameron’s skill as a storyteller.
Publishers Weekly
With its atmospheric Fifties setting and stylish writing, this is one of Cameron’s...finest novels.
Library Journal
Cameron’s shimmering and expectant prose infuses this deceptively simple novel with an incandescent depth.... The decidedly somber and gothic tone of the narrative rings the perfect warning note as the reader begins to suspect that a standard fairy-tale ending is highly unlikely for a cast of lost souls forlornly muted by unrequited longings.
Booklist
[Cameron’s] chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities infrequently found in contemporary American fiction.... Cameron is above all a novelist of manners, building his effects from the drama and comedy of human relationships, working always on a small scale.
Christopher Beha - Bookforum
Shortly after World War II, Coral Glynn, a nurse, shows up at Hart House to take care of an elderly woman dying of cancer, and thus begins a series of unfortunate events.... A slowly unfolding novel that paradoxically contains both engaging characters and wooden dialogue.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Coral Glynn:
1. What do you think of Cora—how would you describe her? Are there times when you find her frustrating? In what ways does her past affect her? For instance, she compares physical affection to hearing someone speak a foreign language. Why?
2. What about Major Hart—how would you describe him? Why does he ask Coral to marry him? Do you think he loves her? Why does Clement rebuff the attentions of Robin, his childhood lover? Is he no longer attracted to, or in love with, Robin? Is there another reason?
3. A reviewer has described Coral, a live-in-nurse, as an "adjunct" to the lives of others. What does that mean? Do you agree?
4. Talk about some of the wonderful symbolism the author uses: the episode in which Coral tries on her wedding dress; the wedding night during which Coral sits on the bed of a dead woman, wearing the nightgown of a suicide; the copse of holly in the woods with its prickly thorns.
5. How do we learn about Coral's past—the way in which the author gradually reveals snippets of information about her. What do we learn...and when do we learn it? Were you surprised by the disclosures?
6. Why doesn't Coral stop the children's "game" in the woods...or at the very least tell Major Hart what she saw? Does what she later tells Clement and Inspector Hoke make sense?
7. In what ways does Coral's life change once she gets to London? What, for instance, is the significance of the luncheon table in Guildford when she looks back through the cafe window—"the remnants of her meal remained there as blatant as evidence: she was a person in the world. She existed, and she was free."
8. (A follow-up to Question 7) At the beginning of Part Three, Coral thinks to herself that she has found happiness, "even if it is not exactly happiness." Comment on her state of mind in this passage:
But it was a sort of freedom: there had been so many problems—it had all been problems, eveything had been a problem for such a long time—and to be released from that perpetually increasing darkness was a kind of joy.
9. What were your feelings when Coral rejected Clement once he visits her in London? Were you disappointed...or relieved? Why does Coral refuse Clement? Might they have been happy together?
10. Talk about social class in this book? How does it manifest itself? Consider to the two conversations Coral has regarding the wedding luncheon guests, one with Clement and one with Dolly. Dolly,for instance, insists that class doesn't matter anymore when it comes to Coral marrying Clemment. Is she right?
13. There is some very funny writing in this book, pensive as it is—the dialogue when Coral first walks into the dress shop, the pastry bun Mrs. Pence tries to give to the inspector, Clement's reaction to the grasshopper cocktail and coral's to the canapes at Dolly and Robin's. What else did you find humorous.
12. Were you surprised by the end? Do you find it satisfying...or would you have preferred a different ending? And why does Clement walk to the woods after Dolly tells him of Coral's visit? Why does he seem melancholy?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)