The Grief of Others
Leah Hager Cohen - Author
ISBN 9781594488054 | 384 pages | 15 Sep 2011 | Riverhead | 9.25 x 6.25in | 18 - AND UP
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Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family? The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous lives. Struggling to regain a semblance of normalcy for themselves and for their two older children, they find themselves pretending not only that little has changed, but that their marriage, their family, have always been intact. Yet in the aftermath of the baby's death, long-suppressed uncertainties about their relationship come roiling to the surface. A dreadful secret emerges with reverberations that reach far into their past and threaten their future. The couple's children, ten-year-old Biscuit and thirteen-year-old Paul, responding to the unnamed tensions around them, begin to act out in exquisitely- perhaps courageously-idiosyncratic ways. But as the four family members scatter into private, isolating grief, an unexpected visitor arrives, and they all find themselves growing more alert to the sadness and burdens of others-to the grief that is part of every human life but that also carries within it the power to draw us together. Moving, psychologically acute, and gorgeously written, The Grief of Others asks how we balance personal autonomy with the intimacy of relationships, how we balance private decisions with the obligations of belonging to a family, and how we take measure of our own sorrows in a world rife with suffering. This novel shows how one family, by finally allowing itself to experience the shared quality of grief, is able to rekindle tenderness and hope. -The Washington Post "Leah Hager Cohen is one of our foremost chroniclers of the mundane complexities, nuanced tragedies and unexpected tendernesses of human connection. . . . For all its deep-seated sorrows, this is a hopeful book, a series of striking vignettes illuminating the humanity of these fully realized characters." -The New York Times Book Review "In this subtle portrait of family life she shows the maddening arithmetic of marriage, the useless attempts to balance the equation. As Ricky and John's kids start to come unglued themselves, we see how the grief of others is contagious. . . . Ms. Cohen's painstaking excavation pays off, especially as Ricky and John decide to rebuild." -The New York Times "Part of the novel's pathos lies in its ability to offer its characters a level of perceptive acuity and sympathetic attention they cannot offer one another ... The book's brilliance lies in moments like this one, these shards of devastating insight. Cohen's empathy is sure-footed and seemingly boundless; her writing gifts its characters with glints of ordinary human radiance. It is the possibility of this glinting that ultimately becomes Cohen's most powerful gift to us, her readers, as well." -San Francisco Chronicle "Cohen's stunning writing and ruthless, beautiful magnification of soul- crushing sorrow that threatens the Ryries' day-to-day family life mesmerizes, wounds, and possibly even heals her readers. Her courageous novel (she knows of what she writes) is to be savored." -Library Journal "The death of a newborn triggers the slow collapse of the Ryrie clan in Hager Cohen's richly layered new novel. . . . Affecting." -More "With this incredibly moving commentary, Cohen has secured a place in the lineup of today's great writers." -Bookpage "Cohen's (House Lights) stunning writing and ruthless, beautiful magnification of soul-crushing sorrow that threatens the Ryries' day-to- day family life mesmerizes, wounds, and possibly even heals her readers. Her courageous novel (she knows of what she writes) is to be savored." -Library Journal "With gorgeous prose, Cohen skillfully takes us from past to present and back again as she explores the ramifications of family loss, grief and longing." -Kirkus "Leah Hager Cohen's new novel is a perceptive, absorbing drama about the complex bonds of the modern American family and the treacherous paradox of the way we live now. Somehow, the more open and flexible we try to become as spouses and parents, the more emotional risks we take-and the more secrets we keep. I love how deeply Cohen delves into the hearts of all her characters, bringing them fully alive, from their most heroic strivings to their darkest flaws." -Julia Glass, author of The Widower's Tale "The Grief of Others is an engrossing and revealing look at a family sinking beneath the weight of a terrible secret. Leah Hager Cohen writes about difficult subjects with unfailing compassion and insight." -Tom Perrotta, New York Times-bestselling author of Little Children "How does a family transcend its own pain? How do the secrets we keep shape our lives and the lives of those we love? In this gracefully written, elegantly structured novel, Leah Hager Cohen has created an indelible cast of characters whose story is at once wrenching and redemptive. This is a beautiful book." -Dani Shapiro, author of Family History "The Grief of Others is a gorgeous, absorbing, intricately told tale of one family on the brink of collapse, as well as an intimate exploration of art and its place in our lives. Leah Hager Cohen expertly juggles six characters and all their needs, yearning, wounds, and secrets with tremendous skill and- even more important-deep and tender compassion. She is a masterlyl writer on every level." -Lily King, author of Father of the Rain "The Grief of Others is delicate, haunting, and lovely, and very difficult to leave on the shelf." -Susanna Daniel, author of Stiltsville "A wise and compassionate novel that looks frankly at the ways members of a family can wound and betray each other, even when trying to do just the opposite. Readers will be tempted to vilify Ricky, but she's much too complex for that. Despite the lies, subterfuges, and silences these characters inflict on one another, there are no villains here, just a family trying to carry on." -Suzanne Berne, author of The Ghost at the Table "At once compact and sweeping. Cohen never strikes a false note in relating the complicated emotions of her characters. She has created a world both universal and particular. She illuminates all the ways it is glorious to be burdened with full-fledged humanity in the vast universe." -Robb Forman Dew, author of The Evidence Against Her In Her Own Words When, between the births of my second and third children, I had a miscarriage, the sadness I felt was much greater than I would have imagined. With two healthy children already, and an understanding of how common miscarriages are, I rebuked myself: the cause of my suffering was nothing, a trifle, compared to what millions of people around the world endured. I felt almost ashamed of being so sad, and the shame as well as the sadness were isolating. Something my mother said then was meaningful to me. She talked about the women all over the world who were at that moment sharing the same hard circumstance of loss. Also she talked about women back through time, all the generations of ancestors who, too, must have known this pain. Her words put me in good company. They dissolved my notion of a hierarchy of grief, made me see instead that both geographically and temporally, I was in community with people who, though we would never meet, never learn one another's names, were yet connected through our common sorrow. This was unexpectedly comforting. So often we feel lonely in our grief. So often we are in grief over our loneliness. The characters in this book all start out rather lonely. I imagine them revolving on separate, meager floes of ice, variously aware or ignorant of just how much they're cut adrift, yet each one, whether by design or blind instinct, seeking, striving to feel more whole. Some of that striving leads to ignoble behavior: we see cheating and lying, blame and betrayal, acts of incivility that, however strenuously and elaborately rationalized, alienate the members of this little family not only from one another but from their own better selves. Yet each of them possesses, crucially, the willingness to grow. How bravely and messily they refuse to succumb to the muddle they've made of things; how hard they fight to come back together - not only back to themselves but back to one another. And isn't it a funny and fine thing to realize: that being whole nearly always requires not just the tending of ourselves, but the tending of our bonds with others? This is an ensemble novel in a formal sense - the chapters alternate among the experiences of six central characters - and in a deeper sense, too, ensemble being precisely what promises to redeem them from their most obdurate grief. |
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