American Cream: A Novel

by Catherine Tudish

When Catherine Tudish's story collection Tenney's Landing was published in 2005, Margot Livesey said Tudish "casts an irresistible spell" and David Huddle said, "Tenney's Landing conjures up a place and a people with that magical vividness we found in Porter, Welty, Cheever, and Updike. " Here, in her first novel, Tudish has fashioned a masterful and intimate portrait of a woman returning, midlife, to the small farming community where she grew up.

After Nathan Rownd is injured in a tractor accident, his daughter, Virginia, leaves her suburban life and returns to Tenney's Landing with her teenage son to work the family farm. She struggles with the long periods of separation from her husband and begrudgingly relearns the insistent, exhausting cadence of farm chores. But when Nathan decides to sell the farm, Virginia realizes how deep her connection to the land is and begins to question who she is and where she belongs.
Catherine Tudish's writing is a tribute to small-town America. In simple, elegant prose she captures the rhythms of everyday life and the moments of truth and transformation that are found there. American Cream is a tender and wise novel by a writer of unusual sensitivity and grace.

Genres: Fiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Catherine Tudish is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Tenney's Landing. Tudish taught writing and literature at Harvard for eight years before moving to Vermont to work as a journalist and fiction writer. She now teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and Dartmouth College.

Reviews

[Susan Coleman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wound up being very disappointed by this book. It started out with a lot of promise as we meet Virginia at her father's (Nathan) wedding. The wedding is taking place about a year after Virginia's mother's (Caroline) death, and no one in the family seems pleased with Nathan's new wife, the former school lunch lady. But we never learn what drew Nathan to lunch lady Lydia, nor do we get a deeper sense of the family's issues with her other than the timing of the wedding and some odd sniping here and there.

The story just never takes off for me. We see additional conflict created with the arrival of Virginia and her son Randall at the family farm, there to help out with the harvest after an accident that lays Nathan up. There was real potential here for Virginia to face her past in a hometown that she'd left at 18 to go to college. There was the opportunity for confrontation galore with her father, with her former best friend (Henny) and her high school lover (West), but the story gets bogged down with the relatively uninteresting side stories of trouble-makers Irene and Jodie, Henny's dour outlook on life, and Virginia's perusal of her mother's journals, which never really give us much insight into Caroline's person or her relationship with her daughter and husband.

What instead unfolds is a story of a woman who manages to make mistake after mistake, but never faces any consequences for them. She leaves a wonderful man (West) behind when she goes to college and marries a handsome soon-to-be doctor. She leaves her family behind and then pouts when her father seeks companionship with a new wife. She leaves her wheelchair-ridden best friend behind and then feels slighted when she doesn't roll out the red carpet when the prodigal daughter returns. To cap it all off, her son Randall runs away, but is then found safe and sound a couple of states away. She whines about her father's desire to sell the family farm and enjoy a little ease in his later years, so to destroy that dream, she buys him two horses to take care of. While on the trip to purchase the two horses (with her doctor husband's money), she sleeps with her high school lover. But none of these selfishly motivated actions ever come back to bite her in the backside. Her former lover falls for her all over again, but then this entanglement is resolved in the matter of three or four lines at the very end of the book, when our heroine Virginia chooses to leave again...leave behind her wheelchair-bound friend, her father, who not only has a farm and the standard livestock to look after, but now also has to take care of the horses, and her high school lover, who somehow was just OK with her flip-flopping on him again?

It seems the author created a few too many characters, couldn't make them all terribly interesting, and couldn't focus on the characters and story lines that could have really created some good tension.

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely loved Tudish’s short story collection, Tenney’s Landing. The novel takes place in the same fictional rural Pennsylvanian town of Tenney’s Landing. The main character, Virginia, returns to this, her hometown, to help at her father’s farm as he recovers from an injury. This homecoming of course prompts her reevaluate her life choices and to wonder if she actually belongs at the farm. This is complicated by her teenage son’s attachment to a troubled teenaged girl who lives in the neighborhood, as well as Virginia’s awkward reconnection with her high school sweetheart, now that both are married. American Cream kept me interested throughout but Tudish’s short story collection was much, much better.

[Jillwitucki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful but realistic picture of life on the farm, and the people who live there, and the difficult decisons they need to make. A heartwarming story full of people who come to life in this story.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

After her father is injured in a tractor accident, Virginia leaves her home in the Maryland suburbs to help run the farm in Pennsylvania while her father recovers.
Great portrayal of the modern American farm and small town life.

[Deidre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the rare book not written by Kent Haruf that captures the authentic small town experience. I rooted for the female characters in this book & I knew them.