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Old Devotions
Bored, cynical, and restless, thirty-five-year-old writer Isabel Schliemann and her old college friend, Morgan Whiteside, attempt to find new purpose, goals, and directions for their lives
- GenresFiction
Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 5, 2025
very few online reviews and most bad. i found this at a used book store and its seemed a nice length and for $3 what the heck. the writing was quite perfect- witty, surprising and deft. the interior life of the main character Isabel was authentic and sad, and the book captured loneliness and frustration and friendship through all sorts of short conversations and memories. it's depressing but so well done
i really loved it.
i really loved it.
September 25, 2009
This is an out-of-print women's novel--I guess 'middlebrow' or 'midmarket'. The voice is strong and so are some (not all) of the characterizations, and some of the backstories--though Perrin uses too many flashbacks--are compelling, but in all there's a definite late 70s-early80s flavor that dates it.
It is the fist-person story of 35 year old divorced Isabel, a late 20th Century 'single gal' (probably born in the late 1940s) who today might seem more representative of her class and generation if the author had not made her into a writer. There's far too much about 'art' in the novel (Isabel's would-be-rival, Margaret, is a painter), failing thus to illuminate the characters as 'everypeople' so that readers' identification with them is more difficult. Isabel, at this point in her life, is at a cross-roads: she can no longer write (we don't know why and her 2 previous books have failed to make much of an impression) and seems never to have been truly 'in love.' Her friends (strangely ignoring all issues of morality and loyalty) have pushed her into a relationship with David--a successful, married father with a sick wife whom he later divorces, though even then Isabel does not want him.
Instead, she finds that whom she does want is the one man she can never have: rather abruptly, she falls devastatingly in love with her best friend's husband (introduced to us as a man she could never stand, in a very Austenlike sort of way). Morgan, her best friend from college, is dying of cancer and Isabel has been summoned to care for her children and suburban New Jersey house: an existence until then entirely foreign to Isabel but, suddenly and without warning, appealing. The problem here is that it is hard to believe these two really ARE best friends. Isabel seems to know very little about Morgan's life or her children and she shows an almost alarming lack of empathy and compassion for Morgan's rapid descent into terminal illness. Likewise, her place in Morgan's life and home, her immediate attraction to Douglas (again, we've been told she detested him) reads like a (bad) romance and is totally lacking in and of itself in morality and loyalty. The final chapters of the novel read as if Isabel were actually waiting for Morgan's death so she could slip into her place!
That doesn't happen, though. Instead of morality, the author cuts isabel down to size.
It's an excellent wry, self-conscious, humorous novel, the story of the thoughtful, ironic Isabel, a writer who finds herself single in her mid-thirties, and unfortunately falls in love with her dying best friend Morgan's husband and difficult suburban family way of life when she is called in to help with the children.
It is the fist-person story of 35 year old divorced Isabel, a late 20th Century 'single gal' (probably born in the late 1940s) who today might seem more representative of her class and generation if the author had not made her into a writer. There's far too much about 'art' in the novel (Isabel's would-be-rival, Margaret, is a painter), failing thus to illuminate the characters as 'everypeople' so that readers' identification with them is more difficult. Isabel, at this point in her life, is at a cross-roads: she can no longer write (we don't know why and her 2 previous books have failed to make much of an impression) and seems never to have been truly 'in love.' Her friends (strangely ignoring all issues of morality and loyalty) have pushed her into a relationship with David--a successful, married father with a sick wife whom he later divorces, though even then Isabel does not want him.
Instead, she finds that whom she does want is the one man she can never have: rather abruptly, she falls devastatingly in love with her best friend's husband (introduced to us as a man she could never stand, in a very Austenlike sort of way). Morgan, her best friend from college, is dying of cancer and Isabel has been summoned to care for her children and suburban New Jersey house: an existence until then entirely foreign to Isabel but, suddenly and without warning, appealing. The problem here is that it is hard to believe these two really ARE best friends. Isabel seems to know very little about Morgan's life or her children and she shows an almost alarming lack of empathy and compassion for Morgan's rapid descent into terminal illness. Likewise, her place in Morgan's life and home, her immediate attraction to Douglas (again, we've been told she detested him) reads like a (bad) romance and is totally lacking in and of itself in morality and loyalty. The final chapters of the novel read as if Isabel were actually waiting for Morgan's death so she could slip into her place!
That doesn't happen, though. Instead of morality, the author cuts isabel down to size.
It's an excellent wry, self-conscious, humorous novel, the story of the thoughtful, ironic Isabel, a writer who finds herself single in her mid-thirties, and unfortunately falls in love with her dying best friend Morgan's husband and difficult suburban family way of life when she is called in to help with the children.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews