The Open Door

by Floyd Skloot

Myron Adler is a butcher and Faye, his pretentious wife, leads a fantasy life filled with high-class suitors. Through the 1940s and '50s the Adlers raise two sons, who are kept off-balance and cautious -- unsure when sweetness will instantly turn bitter or a peaceful Sunday dinner will erupt into brutal violence.With candor and precision, Skloot captures the nuances of second-generation immigrant life as well as the pulse of mid-century Brooklyn -- where Mafia heavies, baseball's Dodgers, the Mad Bomber, and two- bit boxers populate a world the Adler brothers seem destined to inherit.

230 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1997

About the author

Floyd was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, and moved to Long Beach, NY, ten years later. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with a B.A. in English, and completed an M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. From 1972 until becoming disabled by viral-borne brain damage in 1988, Floyd worked in the field of public policy in Illinois, Washington, and Oregon. He began publishing poetry in 1970, fiction in 1975, and essays in 1990. His work has appeared in many major literary journals in the US and abroad. His seventeen books have won wide acclaim and numerous awards, and are included in many high school and college curricula. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin & Marshall College.


An Oregonian since 1984, Floyd moved from Portland to rural Amity when he married Beverly Hallberg in 1993. They lived in a cedar yurt in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods for 13 years before moving back to Portland.


Floyd's daughter, the nonfiction writer Rebecca Skloot, lives in Memphis, TN, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis and works as a freelance writer. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published by Crown Books in February, 2010 and became an immediate NY Times and Indie Bound bestseller. Her work has been included in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Food Writing and Women’s Best Friend anthologies as well as appearing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, O: Oprah’s Magazine and elsewhere. Her boyfriend, writer and actor David Prete, author of Say That to My Face (Norton, 2003), recently completed his second book of fiction and teaches writers how to improve their public reading skills. Floyd's stepson, Matthew Coale, lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver, Washington.


Floyd's current projects include new poems and essays that are slowly shaping into a new book.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skloot has achieved fame, for his splendid essays about his struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as well as for his poetry. He deserves all the acclaim both forms of writing have brought him, to be sure. For Goodreads, however, I prefer to single out this overlooked fiction, a family study that was, in 1997, his third novel of the decade. THE OPEN DOOR has the tragic vitality of an old dark hunk of a bed and boxsprings abandoned in a city street. It spans two generations of distracted, thoughtless, often deliberately hurtful loving, yet towards the end devotes its most touching moments to the partial repairs that can be achieved by the victims of such homes. And while child abuse always claims the story's heart, it sets this agony within the culturally vibrant, frequently funny backdrop of mid-century Brooklyn. The parents in question are Myron and Faye Adler, and indeed, they're spirit-addlers, plus the adders in childhood's Eden. The couple has been slap-pasted together by societal pressures, but they remain so wrong for each other they invite comparison to some of the glaring mismatches found in Dickens. They keep themselves almost as much on edge as their two tormented sons, Richard and Danny. These boys must navigate their home like mine-sweepers, eyes and ears pitched for the first signals of adult explosions lurking everywhere. The violence also limns several neighborhoods of '50s New York, the well-swept stoops and cavernous movie houses drenched, in lesser novels, with nostalgic syrup. Skloot, on the other hand, never loses his wised-up, tamped-down clarity. His ultimate vision of partial, possible redemption, takes place in a pay-to-play batting cage.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this among the books at our beach house at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This was a devastating book about a family. It could be about any family but this story about the Adlers of New York is memorable, both in its cruel depiction of man (and woman's) in humanity toward their fellow man (in this case, their two sons)and in the brilliant way their story is told. At times it was laugh-out-loud funny when it depicted the foibles of Myron and Faye Adler. And at times it made me want to cry. What a writer! I don't know if he actually penned this after he suffered a devastating brain illness from a virus (according to his biography) but it's hard to believe anyone with a damaged brain could write like this! I loved this sad book! A must read!