Leeway Cottage
Beth Gutcheon, 2005
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060539061
Summary
In April 1940, as the Nazis march into Denmark, Sydney Brant, a wealthy girl of the Dundee summer colony, marries a gifted Danish pianist, Laurus Moss. They believe they are well matched, as young lovers do, but Laurus's beloved family is in Copenhagen, hostage to what the fortunes of Hitler's war will bring.
By the time the war is over, Laurus's family has played an active role in Denmark's grassroots rescue of virtually all seven thousand of the country's Jews. Meanwhile, in America, Sydney has led a group knitting for the war effort, and had a baby.
Combining the story of one long American twentieth-century marriage with one of the most stirring stories of World War II, Leeway Cottage is a beautifully written tour de force of a novel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1945
• Where—Sewickley, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—New York, NY
Beth Gutcheon grew up in western Pennsylvania. She attended the Sewickley Academy, Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, and Harvard College, where she took an honors B.A. in English literature. She has spent most of her adult life in New York City, except for sojourns in San Francisco and on the coast of Maine.
In 1978, she wrote the narration for a feature-length documentary on the Kirov ballet school, The Children of Theatre Street, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and she has made her living as a full-time storyteller (novels and occasional screenplays) since then. Gutcheon's novels have been translated into 14 languages (if you count the pirated Chinese edition of Still Missing), plus large-print and audio formats. Still Missing was made into a feature film called Without a Trace and was also published in a Reader's Digest Condensed version, which particularly pleased the author's mother. (From the author's website.)
More
From a 2005 Barnes and Noble interview:
"When my second novel was in manuscript, a subsidiary rights guy at my publisher secretly sent a copy of it to a friend who was working in Hollywood with the producer Stanley Jaffe, who had made Goodbye Columbus, The Bad News Bears, and Kramer v. Kramer, run Paramount Pictures before he was 30, and met the queen of England. My agent had an auction set up for the film rights of Still Missing for the following Friday, with some very heavy-hitter producers and such, which was exciting enough. Two days before the auction, Stanley Jaffe walked into my agent's office in New York and said,
"I want to make a pre-emptive bid for Beth Gutcheon's novel."
"But you haven't read it," says Wendy.
"Nevertheless," says Stanley.
"There's an auction set up. It'll cost a lot to call it off," says Wendy.
"I understand that," says Stanley.
Wendy named a number.
Stanley said, "Done," or words to that effect.
To this day, remembering Wendy's next phone call to me causes me something resembling a heart attack. When, several weeks later, Stanley called and asked me if I had an interest in writing the screenplay of the movie that became Without a Trace, I said, ‘No.' He quite rightly hung up on me.
I then spent twenty minutes in a quiet room wondering what I had done. A man with a shelf full of Oscars, on cozy terms with Lizzie Windsor, had just offered me film school for one, all expenses paid by Twentieth Century Fox. He knew I didn't know how to write screenplays. He wasn't offering to hire me because he wanted to see me fail. Who cares that all I ever wanted to see on my tombstone was ‘She Wrote a Good Book?' The chance to learn something new that was both hard and really interesting was not resistible. I spent the rest of the weekend tracking him from airport to airport until I could get him back on the phone. (This was before we all had cell phones.)
I was sitting in my bleak office on a wet gray day, on which my newly teenaged son had shaved his head and I had just realized I'd lost my American Express card, when the phone rang. "Is this Beth Gutcheon?" asked a voice that made my hair stand on end. I said it was. ‘This is Paul Newman,' said the voice.
It was, too. The fine Italian hand of Stanley Jaffe again, he'd recommended me to work on a script Paul was developing. Paul invited me to dinner to talk about it. My son said, "For heaven's sake, Mother, don't be early and don't be tall." I was both. We did end up writing a script together; it was eventually made for television with Christine Lahti, and fabulous Terry O'Quinn in the Paul Newman part, called The Good Fight."
Extras
• I read all the time. My husband claims I take baths instead of showers because I can't figure out how to read in the shower, and he's right.
• I started buying poetry for the first time since college after 9/11, but wasn't reading it until a friend mentioned that she and her husband read poetry in the morning before they have breakfast. She is right — a pot of tea and a quiet table in morning sunlight is exactly the right time for poetry. I read the New York Times Book Review in the bath and on subways because it is light and foldable. I listen to audiobooks through earphones while I take my constitutionals or do housework. I read physical books for a couple of hours every night after everyone else is in bed—usually two books alternately, one novel and one biography or book of letters.
• I have a dog named Daisy Buchanan. She ran for president last fall; her slogan was ‘No Wavering, No Flip-flopping, No pants.' She doesn't know yet that she didn't win, so if you meet her, please don't tell her.
• When I was in high school I invented, by knitting one, a double-wide sweater with two turtlenecks for my brother and his girlfriend. It was called a Tweter and was even manufactured in college colors for a year or two. There was a double-paged color spread in Life magazine of models wearing Tweters and posing with the Jets football team. My proudest moment was the Charles Addams cartoon that ran in The New Yorker that year. It showed a Tweter in a store window, while outside, gazing at it in wonder, was a man with two heads.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her answer:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Dickens often manages to be both dramatic and funny, while telling a thundering great story, but in Great Expectations, in spite of the unforgettable gargoyles like Miss Havisham and charming Wemmick with his Aged P, it's a very human story about the difference between how things look and how they really are. When Pip recognizes how he has fooled himself, and what he must accept about reality, you see that while Dickens has been amusing you with any number of major and minor melody lines that all seemed to be tripping along by themselves, he has in fact been in perfect control, building up to a major chord, every note right and every instrument contributing at just the right moment. I understood that to make a novel pay off like that, you have to know from the get-go what story you are telling, how it ends, what it means, and exactly what you want the reader to feel and know when it's over. It was the book that made me start thinking like a writer, not just as a passionate reader, about how stories are made.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes and Noble.)
Book Review
It's daring when a writer undertakes a story with intentionally unlikable main characters; Anthony Trollope was one of the very few to pull it off, in The Eustace Diamonds. Fortunately, Gutcheon has strong narrative skills, so while Leeway Cottage doesn't approach the breathless, involving hurtle of Trollope, it's absorbing, mostly because of the subplot about the Danes' remarkable efforts to save the country's Jews (almost all of whom survived the war, despite the German occupation).
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times
In this sprawling family epic, Gutcheon (More Than You Know) chronicles how an unlikely marriage endures over the course of the 20th century. The novel is anchored in the idyllic, fictional summer colony of Dundee, Maine, which will always feel like home to Annabelle Sydney Brant, but turns on the story of the Danish resistance against the Nazis in WWII, a revolt Annabelle's Danish-born, half-Jewish husband, Laurus Moss, leaves the U.S. to join. Annabelle matures from the young, cosseted Annabee (coming-out parties in Cleveland, sailing in Maine) to the bohemian Sydney (voice lessons and a flat in New York City), clashing with her chilly, socialite mother, Candace, along the way. In New York, she meets Laurus, a pianist, and as they court, Hitler marches on Europe. When the Nazis invade Denmark in 1940, Laurus cannot rest idly with his homeland and family endangered, so joins the London-based Danish Resistance. During their separation, Sydney gives birth to the first of three children and Laurus's family escapes from Denmark to Sweden. The war and time apart change but don't estrange Laurus and Sydney, whose lasting union despite glaring differences puzzles observers: "Sydney and Laurus Moss were like a tiger and a zebra married to each other. What were those two doing together?" Charting a marriage against the backdrop of a tumultuous century, Gutcheon writes evocatively of love and war.
Publishers Weekly
In Gutcheon's latest (after More Than You Know), Annabelle Sydney Brant grows up adored by her father and largely criticized by her mother. The best times of her life are spent in the family summer home, Leeway Cottage, in Dundee, ME. After her father's death, a miserable Sydney moves to New York City to study music in an act of rebellion against her mother's superficial lifestyle. There, she falls in love with Laurus Moss, a Danish pianist whom she eventually marries. When World War II breaks out, Laurus moves to London to help build the Danish Resistance and save Denmark's Jews from Nazi extermination. Meanwhile, Sydney gives birth to a daughter who, sadly, will not meet her father until the war is over. Though Sydney turns into a woman not unlike the mother she despises, her marriage endures. Gutcheon tells brave stories of the Danish people, including grim scenes set in concentration camps. A curious combination of a World War II historical/ summer house novel, this is a good old-fashioned, all-encompassing read, with tears and smiles guaranteed. Recommended for all public libraries. —Keddy Ann Outlaw, Harris Cty. P.L.
Library Journal
The wounds inflicted by bad parenting, the complexities of a flawed but enduring marriage, and Denmark's resistance to the Nazis: three compelling themes awkwardly yoked together in this ambitious latest from Gutcheon (More Than You Know, 2000, etc.). The author's gift for plunging readers directly into her story is evident on the first page, as three siblings sort through the belongings of their parents, who have died together in the family's summer home. Gutcheon then moves back to trace the history of Leeway Cottage in Maine and the miserable childhood of Sydney Brant, anxious daughter of cold, disapproving Candace. In 1938, Sydney falls in love with expatriate Danish pianist Laurus Moss, drawn to his warmth and delighted to shock her snobbish mother by marrying the grandson of a baker. The newlyweds spend a happy summer at Leeway in 1941, but when Laurus leaves a pregnant Sydney that fall to aid the European war effort, the narrative takes a sharp, startling turn. Sydney drops out almost completely for a hundred pages devoted to Laurus's family, particularly his sister Nina, one of the many Danes who risk their lives and save nearly all of the nation's Jews. By the time Nina is liberated from Ravensbruck concentration camp and Laurus returns to America, the grim Danish section has laid the groundwork for an entirely different perspective on Sydney. The unloved girl who seemed so appealing is revealed as a damaged, angry and selfish woman, though Gutcheon deftly drops in a few admirable acts to remind us no one is entirely good or all bad. Laurus remains steadfastly loyal, to the bewilderment of their three children as the narrative moves with increasing speed and selectiveness through the subsequent half-century. A harrowing account of Nina's ordeal at Ravensbruck makes an odd precursor to the final chapter at Leeway. Yet Gutcheon's insights are so keen, her sympathy for all her characters so contagious, that the story's imperfect structure can almost be forgiven. There's more going on here than the narrative can comfortably contain, but Gutcheon gets an A for effort and a solid B for achievement.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How would you characterize the narrator's voice, which sometimes echoes the sentiments of the characters? Describe the storyteller you envision as the novel unfolds. How does this narration compare to that of the many contributors to the Leeway Cottage Guest Book?
2. What do you make of the fact that Sydney's musical talent does not evolve into a profession for her, despite her desire for an unconventional role in the world? Do she and Laurus have a similar appreciation for the arts? In what way does she embody a shifting chapter in American cultural history?
3. From joining the Resistance to integrating his local YMCA, Laurus is willing to be an agent for justice at every turn. From where does he derive this courage? How does his understanding of compassion compare to that of the other men in Sydney's life, including her father, her son, and Neville?
4. Leeway Cottage captures the jealousy Candace feels regarding Sydney's relationship with her father, an emotion Sydney comes to understand when she is a mother herself. Do you believe this dynamic is common or rare? What factors contribute to it?
5. What theories do you have about the reason for Berthe Brant's suicide? Did her marriage to James mirror Sydney's marriage to Laurus in any way?
6. Discuss the role of Gladdy and her family in Sydney's life. What is the significance of Sydney and Laurus making their home at Leeway Cottage, rather than the house built by Sydney's ancestors?
7. Were you surprised by Sydney's infidelity with Neville? How do you interpret the scene in which she and Anselma have an awkward run-in with Gladdy? Do you consider Laurus to have been unfaithful to Sydney during the war?
8. What is the effect of Nina's closing chapter and its position in the novel? Why did Sydney so dislike Nina? What is your understanding of the bequest Nina made to Hans Katz?
9. The novel focuses on many little-known aspects of Nazi occupation, such as Niels Bohr's ultimatum and the Rosh Hashanah plot against Danish Jews. What history did you learn from Gutcheon's telling of it? In what way is this history the centerpiece of the novel?
10. What was your reaction to the death of Sydney and Laurus? Do you believe their deaths were due to dementia and accident, or would it have been in character for them to take their own lives? Why do you think Laurus' "movie" was about his sister, rather than about events that came later in his life?
11. In the last paragraph of her notes regarding the novel's historical inspiration, the author writes "their marriage lasts, as did so many in their generation, but whether it actually worked, and if so, how, becomes the mystery at the heart of their family." Gutcheon also reminds us of how little Sydney understands about her husband's inner life. Is the Moss marriage a product of its generation? Do contemporary couples have different expectations of love and relationships?
12. How does Gutcheon's use of Dundee in this novel compare to her use of it in More Than You Know? What makes Maine an appropriate setting for both books?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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