Peachtree Road
Anne Rivers Siddons, 1988
HarperCollins
832 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061097232
Summary
Along a quiet street on a hill at the outskirts of Atlanta live a dying breed of Southern aristocrats. Growing up in sprawling mansions, and attended to by black servants, these Buckhead families form a tight nucleus of wealth and power.
This privileged way of life is about to be shattered by the nascent Civil Rights Movement, and the arrival of the headstrong, exuberant beauty, Lucy Bondurant. From the moment young Lucy, her siblings, and their mother, Willa, arrive on their in-law's front doorstep, life in the Bondurant mansion at 2500 Peachtree Road will never be the same. Lucy and her shy older cousin, Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, instantly forge a tight, obsessive bond with one another that will leave a trail of ruin and misery in its path.
As Lucy and Shep grow from children to adults, it quickly becomes clear that Shep will never be the gregarious and suave Southern gentleman his family expects, and Lucy will never become a quiet and demur Southern belle. As the rigid aristocratic social codes exert more pressures on the young cousins, their fierce infatuation with one another grows stronger. When Shep attempts to break away from his cousin and lead a separate life in New York as a librarian, Lucy begins to experience severe manic episodes. Swerving from hospital beds to bad marriages and back again, Lucy desperately searches for the father she never had, and finds, instead, heartbreak and betrayal.
As Atlanta transforms itself from a sleepy Southern town into a thriving modern metropolis, the Bondurants struggle with a legacy of incest and their own frustrated, impossible desires. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1936
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., Auburn University; Atlanta School of Art
• Currently—lives in Charleston, South Carolina and Maine
Born in 1936 in a small town near Atlanta, Anne Rivers Siddons was raised to be a dutiful daughter of the South — popular, well-mannered, studious, and observant of all the cultural mores of time and place. She attended Alabama's Auburn University in the mid-1950s, just as the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam. Siddons worked on the staff of Auburn's student newspaper and wrote an editorial in favor of integration. When the administration asked her to pull the piece, she refused. The column ran with an official disclaimer from the university, attracting national attention and giving young Siddons her first taste of the power of the written word.
After a brief stint in the advertising department of a bank, Siddons took a position with the up and coming regional magazine Atlanta, where she worked her way up to senior editor. Impressed by her writing ability, an editor at Doubleday offered her a two-book contract. She debuted in 1975 with a collection of nonfiction essays; the following year, she published Heartbreak Hotel, a semi-autobiographical novel about a privileged Southern coed who comes of age during the summer of 1956.
With the notable exception of 1978's The House Next Door, a chilling contemporary gothic compared by Stephen King to Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, Siddons has produced a string of well-written, imaginative, and emotionally resonant stories of love and loss —all firmly rooted in the culture of the modern South. Her books are consistent bestsellers, with 1988's Peachtree Road (1988) arguably her biggest commercial success. Described by her friend and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation," the book sheds illuminating light on the changing landscape of mid-20th-century Atlanta society.
Although her status as a "regional" writer accounts partially for Siddons' appeal, ultimately fans love her books because they portray with compassion and truth the real lives of women who transcend the difficulties of love and marriage, family, friendship, and growing up.
Extras
• Although she is often compared with another Atlanta author, Margaret Mitchel, Siddons insists that the South she writes about is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her relationship with the region is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize it."
• Siddons' debut novel Heartberak Hotel was turned into the 1989 movie Heart of Dixie, starry Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen, and Phoebe Cates. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Pre-internet books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
As in the bestselling Homeplace, Siddons again depicts the demise of genteel Atlanta and its submergence in the Sunbelt culture while keeping the reader engrossed in a suspenseful tale featuring vividly portrayed characters. If sometimes her prose acquires melodramatic excess, Siddons is generally a gifted raconteur in the style of Pat Conroy, and her imaginative plot twists make this hefty novel an absorbing page-turner. From the sad vantage point of middle age, narrator Shepard Gibbs Bondurant III tells the story of his bewitchingly beautiful but manipulative, destructive cousin Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable. Abandoned by her father and ignored by her cold, social-climbing mother, Lucy has an insatiable need for love and protection. She commands Shep's devotion and loyalty through her two doomed marriages even as her volatile behavior accelerates into madness. Meanwhile, she has destroyed Shep's relationship with Sarah Cameron, daughter of another socially prominent Atlanta family. Central to the novel is Siddons's portrayal of Atlanta's social elite, who live in the exclusive suburb called Buckland, epitomized by Peachtree Road. Her depiction of the young set, called Pinks and Jells, "the golden elect of an entire generation," is a cameo of social history. She is equally adroit in interpolating civil rights and other germane social issues into the plot. But it is as an accomplished story teller that Siddons makes her mark, pulling out all the emotional stops in a compulsively readable narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Peachtree Road begins with the famous sentence, "The South killed Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable on the day she was born." How so? What aspects of the South laid the groundwork for her "textbook murder" before Lucy was even born? How was her destruction "classical in concept?" Could anyone have saved her?
2. Both Lucy and her mother, Willa, were outsiders to the world of Peachtree Road. How did they each adapt to their new environment? What steps do they each take to insure their own protection? Who was more successful, and why? What price did each of them pay for their adaptation?
3. Why were Lucy and Shep so obsessed with one another? How did they each define themselves by the other? By always being Lucy's "rescuing knight," did Shep exacerbate or ameliorate Lucy's manic behavior? How much responsibility does he bear for Lucy's death? Was it a murder, or a suicide?
4. Why does the novel begin with Lucy's funeral? How does the flashback structure affect your experience of Shep's tale? What is the significance of funerals for the Peachtree Road society?
5. By the time Malory turned eighteen, Shep, "had learned, finally, the value of love held lightly in an open hand." What does he mean by that? How had he come to this realization? What are some loves of his life that were NOT "held lightly in an open hand?"
6. Shep remarks frequently on the difficulties faced by Southern women. Do the men of Peachtree Road fare much better? What sorts of pressures do Southern men endure in the novel?
7. How was the elder Ben Cameron the architect of his own political obsolescence? What plans did Ben have for the Buckhead Boys, and Shep in particular? How did the younger Peachtree Road generation fail him?
8. How would you characterize Lucy's relationship with the black people in her life? Why might she have gravitated to their company? Why might she have so fervently adopted their struggles as her own? Do they ultimately betray her? Or does she betray their cause?
9. What role does incest play in the Bondurant family? How does it structure the family's dynamic? Why do you think it is so prevalent? Is it a useful metaphor for the entire privileged class of the South? Why or why not?
10. What role does the elder Ben Cameron play in the Civil Rights Movement? Is it odd that he grooms his chauffeur's son for the position of mayor? Is there a contradiction to having black servants and yet campaigning for racial equality? Do the Camerons' servants enjoy special privileges denied to other servants on Peachtree Road?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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