Red Hook Road
Ayelet Waldman, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
343 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385517867
Summary
As lyrical as a sonata, Ayelet Waldman’s follow-up novel to Love and Other Impossible Pursuits explores the aftermath of a family tragedy.
Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity.
A marriage collapses under the strain of a daughter’s death; two bereaved siblings find comfort in one another; and an adopted young girl breathes new life into her family with her prodigious talent for the violin.
As she writes with obvious affection for these unforgettable characters, Ayelet Waldman skillfully interweaves life’s finer pleasures—music and literature—with the more mundane joys of living. Within these resonant pages, a vase filled with wildflowers or a cold beer on a hot summer day serve as constant reminders that it’s often the little things that make life so precious. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 11, 1964
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Raised—Montreal, Canada; Rhode Island; Ridgewood, New
Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University; J.D., Harvard
University
• Currently—lives in Berkeley, California
Ayelet (eye-YELL-it—"gazelle") Waldman is novelist and essayist who was formerly a lawyer. She is noted for her self-revelatory essays, and for her writing (both fiction and non-fiction) about the changing expectations of motherhood. She has written extensively about juggling the demands of children, partners, career and society, in particular about combining paid work with modern motherhood, and about the ensuing maternal ambivalence.
Waldman is the author of seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and has published four novels of general interest, Daughter's Keeper (2003), Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) Red Hook Road, (2010), and Love and Treasure (2014), as well as a collection of personal essays entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009).
Personal Life
Waldman was born in Jerusalem, Israel. After the 1967 Six-Day War, when she was two and a half, her family moved to Montreal, Canada, then to Rhode Island, finally settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey. By then she was in sixth grade.
Waldman graduated from Wesleyan University, where she studied psychology and government and studied in Isreal for her her junior year. She returned to Israel after college, to live on a kibbutz, but finding it unsatisfying returned to the US. She entered Harvard University and earned her a J.D. in 1991 (she was a class-mate of Barack Obama’s).
After receiving her law degree, Waldman clerked for a federal court judge and worked in a large corporate law firm in New York for a year.
In 1993 she married Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, whose novels include The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys. They met on a blind date, when both were living in New York City. They were engaged in three weeks and married a year later, in 1993.
After moving to California with Chabon, Waldman became a public defence lawyer and later taught law at the University of California at Berkeley. She left the legal profession altogether after the birth of her second child and, although she still calls herself a lawyer on her tax returns, says she will not be returning to the legal profession—preferring to work at home with her husband and their now four children.
Writing
She and Chabon work from the same office in the backyard of their home, often discussing and editing each other's work—critiquing each other's work in what Chabon has called a "creative freeflow."
While working as a university professor, Waldman attempted to research legal issues with a view to writing articles for legal journals and thus increasing her chances of a tenured job teaching law. She has said that every time she tried to write those scholarly articles she because bored or intimidated, so she began writing fiction instead.
Waldman has said that her fiction is all about being a bad mother. She has said she chose to write because it was not as time-consuming a career as the law, it gave her something to do during nap times, kept her entertained, because it gave her a way of putting off going back to work full-time. She has also written several times about her 2002 diagnosis of bipolar disorder, a disease that runs in her family, and has spoken publicly on parenting while having a mental illness. She has said, "When I write about being bipolar, I feel queasy and ashamed, but I also feel really strongly that I shouldn't feel this way, that this is a disease, like diabetes."
Waldman started writing mystery novels, thinking they would be “easy ... light and fluffy." At first she wrote in secret, then with her husband's encouragement. She has said that she chose mysteries because they are primarily about plot. Her Mommy-Track" series, seven mysteries in all, features "part-time sleuth and full-time mother" Juliet Applebaum.
She has also published three literary novels of general interest: Daughter's Keeper (2003) drew on Waldman's experience as a criminal defense lawyer and features a young woman who inadvertently becomes involved in the trafficking of drugs; Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (2006) is about a Harvard-educated lawyer dealing with a precocious step-son and the loss of a newborn child to SIDS; and Red Hook Road (2010) revolves around two bereaved families in a small village in Maine.
Waldman has also published short stories in McSweeney's anthologies, as well as essays in the New York Times, Guardian (UK), San Francisco Chronicle, Elle Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Cookie, Child, Parenting, Real Simple, Health and other publications.
Controversy
Waldmen became the center of controversy for an essay, "Motherlove," in which she wrote, "I love my husband more than I love my children." She went on to say that she could survive the death of her children, but not that of her husband, and summarized her ideal family dynamic as follows: "He [her husband, Chabon] and I are the core of what he cherishes ... the children are satellites, beloved but tangential.” The essay led to extensive and vitriolic debate on television shows like "The View" and "Oprah" (on which she was a guest). (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Some of these relationships seem unlikely, but Waldman knits them together with the pleasing symmetry of a doily, her cool attention to the quotidian details of food, furnishings and personal dress forming a sturdy backdrop for the novel's occasionally soap-operatic plot turns. She also constructs an impressive parallel between the vocations of shipbuilding and playing a stringed instrument. But…what is ultimately prized here is the restoration of domestic harmony… Red Hook Road has its bumps, but readers will enjoy the ride.
Alexandra Jacobs - New York Times
This engagingly complex examination of two close families is a leap ahead for the essayist and author.
O Magazine
Waldman (Love and Other Impossible Pursuits) delivers a dense story of irreparable loss that tracks two families across four summers. After John Tetherly and Becca Copaken die in a freak car accident an hour after their wedding, their families are left to bridge stark class and cultural divides, and eventually forge deep-rooted bonds thanks to the twin deities of love and music. Becca's family is well off, from New York, and summers in Red Hook, Maine, a small coastal town where John's blue-collar single mother, Jane, cleans houses for a living. They interact, awkwardly, over how to bury the couple, the staging of an anniversary party, and over Jane's adopted niece, whose amazing musical talent makes a connection to Becca's ailing grandfather, a virtuoso violinist, who agrees to give her lessons. Becca's younger sister, Ruthie, a Fulbright scholar, meanwhile, falls in love with John's younger brother, Matt, the first Tetherly to go to college, before he drops out to work at a boatyard and finish restoring his brother's sailboat, which he plans on sailing to the Caribbean. Though Waldman is often guilty of overwriting here, the narrative is well crafted, and each of the characters comes fully to life.
Publishers Weekly
It's a beautiful summer day in Maine and perfect weather for the smiling young couple who just got married. Never mind that the groom's mother, Jane, doesn't really like John's marrying a "from awayer"—the name the locals give to people who just spend their summers in East Red Hook near the water. Jane is a Tetherly and, having lived her whole life in East Red Hook, considers her family real Mainers. The bride's mother, Iris Hewins Copaken, insists that she is native since her family's summer home was built in 1879, but since she and husband Daniel spend most of their time in New York City, Jane doesn't see it that way. Now, the guests are waiting for the young couple to show up, but when John's brother, Matt, arrives with two policemen, life as the Tetherlys and Copakens knew it ends. Over the course of four summers, they work through grief, new beginnings, and more loss. Verdict: Waldman has written a tale of two families forced together through love and tragedy. Fans of Waldman's work and readers who enjoy family sagas will find this book a pleasure. —Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH
Library Journal
Critics diverged over Waldman's dissection of the aftermath of tragedy, loneliness, and grief. While some felt drawn in by the intriguing plot, characters, and portrait of grief, no matter how bleak, others felt hoodwinked by an overly depressing, cliched story of fairytale romance and family relationships gone terribly awry.
Bookmarks Magazine
[A] lyrical tale of love and loss...Waldman's startling premise—a newly married couple dies in an automobile accident enroute to their reception—sets the scene for this searing, soul-searching examination of human emotions and reactions
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Red Hook Road:
1. Why might Waldman have chosen to open her novel with the taking of photos after the wedding? What effect does the scene have on the emotional impact of the accident?
2. How would you describe Iris Copaken, mother of the bride?
3. What about Jane Tetherley, mother of the groom—how would you describe her? How does she feel toward Iris? Is Jane's opinion accurate...or does it stem from resentment?
4. Waldman describes a funny—and very human—reaction that always seems to occur whenever Jane talks to Iris. Jane makes Iris...
so uncomfortable that she inevitably found herself fulfilling what she imagined to be Jane's worst expectations of the fancy-pants New York from-away....her voice crept into a high shrill register and she said the most absurd things.
Why does Jane make Iris uncomfortable? Does the passage excuse Iris's behavior—perhaps make her transgressions not so intentional but rather a result of anxiety?
5. How does each of the different characters—parents and siblings—cope with grief?
6. What does Emil Kimmelbrod do for the families? What does he teach them? What have the Holocaust and his music taught Emil about life and death?
7. How—and why—does Waldman draw the parallel between boatbuilding and playing a stringed instrument?
8. How do the two families differ—how does Waldman use them to reflect the clash of culture and class?
9. Can Iris ever truly belong to the Maine community she loves...to which she has such deep ties? Is it her personality that keeps her an outsider, a "from-away," or the fact that the family spends only its summers there?
10. What are the fault lines in Iris and Daniel's marriage? Talk about the impact of the accident on the couple. Absent the tragedy of losing their daughter, would the two have split...or remained together?
11. Care to comment on this passage?
A long marriage, like a classic wooden boat, could be a thing of grace, but only if great effort was devoted to its maintenance.
12. Is the novel's end satisfying...or too much melodrama?
(Questions by LitLovers. Pleas feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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