Open House - Hardcover

Berg, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375506039 ISBN 13: 9780375506031

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Struggling to come to terms with her husband's abandonment, Samantha sets out to construct a new life for herself and her eleven-year-old son, despite financial hardship, and to rediscover her own identity, which had been lost in her attempts to save her marriage

About this title

Review:

The narrator of Elizabeth Berg's Open House calls divorce "a series of internal earthquakes ... one after the other." She ought to know. Samantha is abandoned by her husband in the opening pages of this three-handkerchief special, and the resultant tremors keep her off-balance for most of the novel. There are practical problems aplenty, of course, including a shortage of money and an 11-year-old son to raise. But Sam's sense of emotional bereavement is far worse, despite the fact that her husband had been giving her the conjugal cold shoulder for years:

I miss David so much, yes I do, I miss the presence of another person in my bed at night, even if he doesn't touch me; the reliability of someone else being there in the morning, even if they only shave and stare straight ahead into the mirror while you lean against the bathroom doorjamb with your cup of coffee, chatting hopefully.

The loneliness in her "as constant and as irrefutable" as circulating blood, Sam begins to rebuild her life. She finds herself a job and takes in a couple of boarders to help meet her mortgage payments. (One of them, a depressed student named Lavender Blue, informs her that "life was nothing but one major disappointment after the other"--the sort of homily that Sam is understandably reluctant to hear these days.) She also starts dating, with disastrous results. Yet this comically grumbling heroine does manage to find love in the ruins, and by the time Open House winds down, it's hard not to believe that she's much better off. Throughout, Berg alternates her snappy and sappy registers like a real pro. And the conclusion, which most readers will be able to spot a mile off, seems just right--the light at the end of the post-matrimonial tunnel. --Anita Urquhart

Review:

"Berg's narrative is agile and freshly observed." (New York Times Book Review)

"Berg has an ability to capture the way women think, feel and speak - With her quirky characters and precise observations, Berg sits somewhere between Anne Tyler and Alice Hoffman - The details and emotions in Open House are sometimes heartwrenching, sometimes hilarious." (Chicago Sun Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375506039
• ISBN 13: 9780375506031
• Binding: Hardcover