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A Shooting Star
Book by Stegner, Wallace Earle
433 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
11 people are currently reading
548 people want to read
About the author
Wallace Stegner
187 books2,138 followersWallace Earle Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
December 25, 2019
Phew, I am very glad this book is over.
It is d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g. I am fine with depressing books if they say something of importance.
It is long and drawn out. It reads as a soap opera.
The central character is Sabrina Castro. She lives in San Francisco. It is in the1950s. She is financially well-off and married to a doctor with a clientele of the rich and high standing. No, her life may not be perfect, but it is a life others would envy. She is miserable. We watch her descend into moral degradation and self-pity. She wallows in her degradation and self-loathing. She is aware of her failings but lacks the gumption to pick herself up and improve her situation. Down and down she descends.
As I learned why she was this way, I tried to feel empathy for her. I never succeeded. I felt little sympathy for the other characters either.
A lukewarm redemption comes at the end. With her finger in the pot, she manages to influence those around her; .
The book feels unfinished. “Is that it?” you ask yourself when you reach the end. The message conveyed is watered-down and presented in an overworked and unconvincing fashion.
I also dislike the audiobook narration by Bernadette Dunne. I dislike her narration for two reasons. She dramatizes, and in doing so she easily influences how one reacts toward the characters. This is not to my taste. I want to draw my own conclusions about the characters, from the author’s words. I am not interested in her interpretation! Secondly, she reads quickly, maximizing suspense. This increases the tension you feel as you listen. When you switch off the sound you become aware of a need to relax.
Stegner had trouble writing this book. He revised it, rewrote it and revised it again and again. He did not get it right. Usually I like Stegner’s writing, but I do not this book!
************************
Angle of Repose 5 stars
All the Little Live Things 5 stars
Remembering Laughter 4 stars
Crossing to Safety 4 stars
The Spectator Bird 4 stars
The Big Rock Candy Mountain 2 stars
A Shooting Star 1 star
Recapitulation TBR
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West TBR
It is d-e-p-r-e-s-s-i-n-g. I am fine with depressing books if they say something of importance.
It is long and drawn out. It reads as a soap opera.
The central character is Sabrina Castro. She lives in San Francisco. It is in the1950s. She is financially well-off and married to a doctor with a clientele of the rich and high standing. No, her life may not be perfect, but it is a life others would envy. She is miserable. We watch her descend into moral degradation and self-pity. She wallows in her degradation and self-loathing. She is aware of her failings but lacks the gumption to pick herself up and improve her situation. Down and down she descends.
As I learned why she was this way, I tried to feel empathy for her. I never succeeded. I felt little sympathy for the other characters either.
A lukewarm redemption comes at the end. With her finger in the pot, she manages to influence those around her; .
The book feels unfinished. “Is that it?” you ask yourself when you reach the end. The message conveyed is watered-down and presented in an overworked and unconvincing fashion.
I also dislike the audiobook narration by Bernadette Dunne. I dislike her narration for two reasons. She dramatizes, and in doing so she easily influences how one reacts toward the characters. This is not to my taste. I want to draw my own conclusions about the characters, from the author’s words. I am not interested in her interpretation! Secondly, she reads quickly, maximizing suspense. This increases the tension you feel as you listen. When you switch off the sound you become aware of a need to relax.
Stegner had trouble writing this book. He revised it, rewrote it and revised it again and again. He did not get it right. Usually I like Stegner’s writing, but I do not this book!
************************
Angle of Repose 5 stars
All the Little Live Things 5 stars
Remembering Laughter 4 stars
Crossing to Safety 4 stars
The Spectator Bird 4 stars
The Big Rock Candy Mountain 2 stars
A Shooting Star 1 star
Recapitulation TBR
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West TBR
March 21, 2010
An extremely underrated novel by a breathtakingly wonderful writer, this 1961 effort is a unique work in the Stegner canon, chronicling the intellectual and spiritual turning point in the life of an upper class California doctor's wife and heiress to an old New England fortune.
This is a challenging book but not because the protagonist, Sabrina Castro, is "unlikeable" as many other reviewers seem to feel but because underneath the painstaking details of Sabrina's mental and emotional disintegration what you find is a complex novel of ideas.
In the course of the story Stegner looks at the meaning of life with a very subtle and perceptive eye, examining what gives our lives meaning, the relativity of suffering and happiness, the rewards and limitations of both love and money as well as the traps of inertia and procrastination in the face of life's ticking clock.
Any book which can make you think deeply about: love, death, the passage of time, the meaning of your own exsistence and what it means to bring a child into the world, is a reward in the reading.
This is a challenging book but not because the protagonist, Sabrina Castro, is "unlikeable" as many other reviewers seem to feel but because underneath the painstaking details of Sabrina's mental and emotional disintegration what you find is a complex novel of ideas.
In the course of the story Stegner looks at the meaning of life with a very subtle and perceptive eye, examining what gives our lives meaning, the relativity of suffering and happiness, the rewards and limitations of both love and money as well as the traps of inertia and procrastination in the face of life's ticking clock.
Any book which can make you think deeply about: love, death, the passage of time, the meaning of your own exsistence and what it means to bring a child into the world, is a reward in the reading.
June 26, 2023
I read and discussed this book years ago when I first retired. I had signed up through a local community college emeritus class that discussed books and also included local author visits. This class was what encouraged me to go to my local library and offer my services to facilitate a Library Discussion Group and Local author Series program. I will be forever grateful for that class!
On to the review.
Premise: This is the story of Sabrina Castro, as she struggles with the toll of her romantic affair on herself, her marriage and her other relationships.
To be honest, as much as I have loved most of Stegner’s work, this is not one of my favorites.
Sabrina is not a likable character. So, it is hard to root for her. Yes, she is complex, and most likely there is redemption, but…
The story feels like a soap opera. And, if you have been following my reviews, you probably know, that is not my interest area.
And, I get that it was written in the 1950’s, so it is presenting women in a certain era, in which I cannot relate. So, am I being fair? Patient? Open?
I will say this…makes for a great book discussion selection. 2.5 stars.
July 18, 2011
Just goes to show, even a literary hero can lay an egg once in awhile. I gave this book much more time than it deserved because of my great fondness for Stegner, but I had to give up. If you'd given me this book minus the author's name, I never would have guessed Wally had written it. NOTHING like his other work, and I hate to say it, but it almost ventures into literary chick book territory. As far as I went that's what it seemed like, anyway. I did give it two tries, so I won't be revisiting it in the future.
I still love you, Wally! We all make mistakes.
I still love you, Wally! We all make mistakes.
November 3, 2014
Wallace Stegner has been an uneven novelist for this reader. I first read his 1943 historical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a book I could not put down. The Preacher and the Slave, about Joe Hill and the Wobblies was also riveting. A couple others left me either bored or less than enraptured.
He was a great writer both in craft and the conveying of emotion, but sometimes I feel he tried too hard, even to the point of preaching his message too obviously. In A Shooting Star he went overboard on wordiness, his story arc took too long to arc, and while he tried hard to understand his female protagonist, a judgmental flavor spoiled the result.
I've had a time reading my 1961 list, as it has featured many long books and some weaker books by authors I have previously admired. However, as harbingers of cultural change to come, especially the sexual revolution of the late 60s and the second wave of feminism in the 70s, many of these novels are examples of how writers had their fingers on the pulse of change before it became apparent in mainstream culture.
Sabrina Castro, raised in a deeply screwed up but fabulously wealthy family, married a physician. As her husband became successful with rich matrons in Los Angeles, he began to neglect Sabrina. Because she was not able to conceive a child, she was restless, unfulfilled, and lonely. What does a woman in such straights do? She takes a lover. Thus the drama begins.
And goes on and on. Stegner creates tension with Sabrina's indecision about her marriage, her husband (a sanctimonious jerk), and her future. I am fully aware that female dithering is commonplace. I have been guilty of it myself. Reading about it drives me to distraction.
So OK, he gets that aspect of female life and it is in the 1950s when a woman could not easily go outside of accepted societal norms, no matter how rich she was, but it still went on too long. I also detected whiffs of Freudian concepts about females suffering from infantile behavior. Yuck! A woman working through issues with a messed up mother is not infantile, she is working through issues.
Bottom line: worth reading as a sign of the times; maddening that it took me six days to do so.
He was a great writer both in craft and the conveying of emotion, but sometimes I feel he tried too hard, even to the point of preaching his message too obviously. In A Shooting Star he went overboard on wordiness, his story arc took too long to arc, and while he tried hard to understand his female protagonist, a judgmental flavor spoiled the result.
I've had a time reading my 1961 list, as it has featured many long books and some weaker books by authors I have previously admired. However, as harbingers of cultural change to come, especially the sexual revolution of the late 60s and the second wave of feminism in the 70s, many of these novels are examples of how writers had their fingers on the pulse of change before it became apparent in mainstream culture.
Sabrina Castro, raised in a deeply screwed up but fabulously wealthy family, married a physician. As her husband became successful with rich matrons in Los Angeles, he began to neglect Sabrina. Because she was not able to conceive a child, she was restless, unfulfilled, and lonely. What does a woman in such straights do? She takes a lover. Thus the drama begins.
And goes on and on. Stegner creates tension with Sabrina's indecision about her marriage, her husband (a sanctimonious jerk), and her future. I am fully aware that female dithering is commonplace. I have been guilty of it myself. Reading about it drives me to distraction.
So OK, he gets that aspect of female life and it is in the 1950s when a woman could not easily go outside of accepted societal norms, no matter how rich she was, but it still went on too long. I also detected whiffs of Freudian concepts about females suffering from infantile behavior. Yuck! A woman working through issues with a messed up mother is not infantile, she is working through issues.
Bottom line: worth reading as a sign of the times; maddening that it took me six days to do so.
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July 5, 2019“If he had said anything—anything!—to indicate that he felt as a wronged husband should feel. But that controlled suspension of judgment, that look not critical but only clinical, as if the gross symptoms of treachery were to be gathered together objectively like the symptoms of peptic ulcers.”
The above is stated in the opening paragraph of the novel, and it is obvious from the outset that Sabrina has committed adultery and has confessed all to her husband. Said husband, a socialite medical doctor in California, does not storm and rage, but phlegmatically and clinically questions her and assesses the problem. And therein lies the problem as far as Sabrina is concerned.
Poor little rich girl, no, make that fabulously rich girl. All she ever wanted was to be loved, touched, desired. She was brought up by a mother who perhaps loved her, but showed no tenderness; a mother whose focus was to ensure that Sabrina did and said the right things so that she would not embarrass the family. Then she married Burke, the doctor, who was devoted to his patients. Could he never spare time for her? No wonder she had a short but passionate affair. For once she felt that she was a woman and loved.
But then comes the drama in spades. Guilt, shame, self-hatred, self-pity, self-recrimination, self-destruction and histrionics. Overwrought, self-indulgent Sabrina all but drowns in these fraught emotions. To her the very air is toxic: “The first thing newcomers learned was that the California night air was more destructive to pharynx, tonsils, and sinuses than chlordane was to ants.” She visualises herself in Dante’s hell, in the circle reserved for traitors. Like the protagonist in The Flying Dutchman who can only be redeemed by the love of a faithful woman, Sabrina feels a similar need: “One thing, she assumed, would reprieve her: the touch of unqualified love. But from whom? How? She had the dogs, and no one else.”
There are also other family tensions in the form of an elderly mother who is obsessed with her family history, and a ruthless brother (Oliver) who is obsessed with making money and her mother’s assistant who has her own problems and desires.
Fortunately there is some sanity in the form of her old school friend, unthreatening Barbara (or Bobbie), and even more so her likeable clever and pragmatic husband Leonard.
Sabrina’s character development is slow. She doesn’t change or resolve her problems overnight. There is so much muck (or so she perceives) that she has to work through, and it takes her a long time to take a step in the right direction. She eventually discovers that she is not the only one in the family to have suffered feelings of neglect and lack of love. There is a touching story about a pink balloon.
It is difficult to rate this novel. It lacks the many punchy one- and two-liners which feature in some of Mr Stegner’s other novels. There are some wonderfully descriptive passages. The characterisation is very good. Mr Stegner conveys both the passion and indifference (or simply the inability to express emotions) of his characters. However, this novel didn’t appeal to me as much as Crossing to Safety, The Big Rock Candy Mountain* andRecapitulation** did.
###
Quotes:
Sabrina
“Up the double cone of her headlights she stared into a future blank with what she had almost inadvertently done.”
“Wasn’t it fair to ask what any of them had ever lived for? They had grown on the Hub of the Universe like green mold, implacably avaricious, implacably decorous, never thinking, never feeling, never a part of the stir of ideas, never touched by the arts except when they collected them as real property, never acquainted with great men or associated with wicked ones, but known everywhere without affection among the wealthy.
Four generations of green mold.”
“The fog lay over the whole Peninsula, over the whole of California, over the whole of America, over the whole twentieth century, like the sea over lost Atlantis, not blowing, not moving, but still, dense, settling.”
““Give me the formula,” she said finally. “What else can you suggest for the girl who has everything—too much of everything, a bellyful of everything?””
“Both what she was born to and what she had married into were scale models of paradise, where the fortunate could enjoy lives of luxury and gratified desire. And all she found was chatter, hollowness, horror.”
“And it was as if a pair of eyes inside her mind looked steadfastly straight forward so as not to see what was in their periphery.”
Deborah (Sabrina’s mother)
“There. There was the day, all tidy like a drawer freshly arranged.”
“What a lot of the family was in those drawers! It was as if the generations had been boiled down into a crystalline essence and deposited there.”
“What Oliver thought senility was no more than the tribal habit of accumulation; but where others contented themselves with material things, she also collected Time.”
Burke
““Well,” he said, “I seem to have failed you somehow, or you seem to think so. I don’t understand how. It doesn’t seem to me I could have done much differently. I can’t be someone I’m not.””
Oliver
“If his mother would come out of her dream and listen for five minutes. Here would come the new Junipero Serra freeway, here would come people frantic for good country land, good views, oaks. With people outside the window jumping up and down and waving handfuls of money, her reaction was to draw the curtains.”
Leonard
““Boy, this is the high-school dramatics club, for sure.””
February 3, 2010
Wallace Stegner's best work as a novelist (excepting "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," certainly in his top four) came after age 57; the proof is in the awards ("Angle of Repose," Pulitzer Prize, 1971; "The Spectator Bird," National Book Award, six years later) and in critical consensus. "A Shooting Star," a 1961 novel that predates his classic period that started with "All the Little Live Things" (my favorite), finds Stegner swinging way outside his usual strike zone but, well, lacing a ringing double.
Stegner didn't write anything else quite like this novel. Its focus is Sabrina Castro, a rich, pretty 35-year-old woman married to a rather cold fish of a husband. She's chafing against her privilege and beating herself up over an affair. "A Shooting Star" is far better than its reputation. There is no pioneer-family history (as in "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Angle of Repose"), no crotchety old man as main character (everything after "A Shooting Star"). But it's well worth a read.
An editor should have sent back the first 70 pages for a rewrite — it's slow, awkward going early on. The occasional stumbles of phrase don't end, but Stegner's excellent writing saves the day, and the book acquires a dark momentum.
Some people seem to have a problem with Stegner's ability to get under the skin of a female main character. I didn't. And while it may be hard to sympathize with the navel-gazings of a liberal woman from old money who seems as if she has (or can have) everything, everybody has feelings. Her agony — stay with her husband? continue the affair? abort the baby the affair brought? — hit me. For Sabrina, her indescretion is not a fling but a disintegration. As a character says of her, she's "trying to vanish, only she couldn't because she didn't deserve to vanish." She's described as "this frantic woman threshing like a moth in a web steadily spinning out of her entrails longer and longer filaments to entangle herself."
Sabrina rebels against her moneyed family, battling her muscled, handsome brother who really is in it for the money, siding with her friends — a couple without much money but who otherwise really do seem to have it all — to help her mother leave a charitable legacy of park land, against that brother's wishes. And that couple, living a far less privileged existence, form a nice subplot. For example, amid all of Sabrina's mental strife there is the beauty of a chapter showing the husband clumsily fixing his pregnant wife breakfast in bed, helped by two young daughters with a kitten underfoot. Nice.
"A Shooting Star" is, at best, fifth in my ranking of the seven Stegner novels I've read so far, but there are flashes of Stegner's best prose all over, and that makes parts of the novel a wonder. It's a 3.5-star novel bumped up to 4 for neglect and because for heaven's sake it's Stegner, one of my dozen or so favorite novelists.
Stegner didn't write anything else quite like this novel. Its focus is Sabrina Castro, a rich, pretty 35-year-old woman married to a rather cold fish of a husband. She's chafing against her privilege and beating herself up over an affair. "A Shooting Star" is far better than its reputation. There is no pioneer-family history (as in "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" and "Angle of Repose"), no crotchety old man as main character (everything after "A Shooting Star"). But it's well worth a read.
An editor should have sent back the first 70 pages for a rewrite — it's slow, awkward going early on. The occasional stumbles of phrase don't end, but Stegner's excellent writing saves the day, and the book acquires a dark momentum.
Some people seem to have a problem with Stegner's ability to get under the skin of a female main character. I didn't. And while it may be hard to sympathize with the navel-gazings of a liberal woman from old money who seems as if she has (or can have) everything, everybody has feelings. Her agony — stay with her husband? continue the affair? abort the baby the affair brought? — hit me. For Sabrina, her indescretion is not a fling but a disintegration. As a character says of her, she's "trying to vanish, only she couldn't because she didn't deserve to vanish." She's described as "this frantic woman threshing like a moth in a web steadily spinning out of her entrails longer and longer filaments to entangle herself."
Sabrina rebels against her moneyed family, battling her muscled, handsome brother who really is in it for the money, siding with her friends — a couple without much money but who otherwise really do seem to have it all — to help her mother leave a charitable legacy of park land, against that brother's wishes. And that couple, living a far less privileged existence, form a nice subplot. For example, amid all of Sabrina's mental strife there is the beauty of a chapter showing the husband clumsily fixing his pregnant wife breakfast in bed, helped by two young daughters with a kitten underfoot. Nice.
"A Shooting Star" is, at best, fifth in my ranking of the seven Stegner novels I've read so far, but there are flashes of Stegner's best prose all over, and that makes parts of the novel a wonder. It's a 3.5-star novel bumped up to 4 for neglect and because for heaven's sake it's Stegner, one of my dozen or so favorite novelists.
November 1, 2023
Definitely my least favorite book by Stegner. It's the story of a woman, Sabrina Castro, who is married to a doctor but is frustrated by his busy schedule and feels neglected. She has an affair on the side and decides she wants to leave her marriage and drives all night from her home in Pasadena to her mother's home in Hillsborough. When she contacts her lover to inform him he is not interested in risking his own marriage and her affair ends so she goes on a reckless series of encounters with men until things get completely out of hand. She ends up back at her mothers home and the story continues from there but little else happens. This whole time she is expecting her husband to come to her to beg her to come back. Stegner's writing was its usual magnificent but the story itself was badly told. It was much too long and dwelled on pointless side stories that seemed to go on forever.
August 21, 2014
Sabrina Castro is the wealthy and attractive wife of a Pasadena physician and also the offspring of a transplanted New England family that found wealth but never a sense of purpose. Life begins to unravel for Sabrina after twelve years of childless marriage as a "trophy" wife when she takes a vacation in Mexico and has an affair with a married man.
Torn between her New England family rectitude and her frustrations, she confesses her affair and yet refuses to utterly break it off, until she sees the other husband for who he is, one who won't sacrifice his family but wants a bit of something "on the side". Meanwhile the marriage continues to unravel and with this, Sabrina's life as she goes on an alcoholic binge, ends up sheltering in the home of a Tahoe dog-boarder, and finally comes home to her mother's house and the conflicts within her own family.
Underneath it all is the emptiness of Sabrina's life, rich, and idle, barren (until she discovers she is pregnant by the errant husband) and purposeless. She reconnects with her good friend, Barbara and her husband Leonard, who have worked their way up from poverty to respectable middle-class life in a new suburban community nearby. The book title comes from an evening spent with this family watching a meteor shower and seems a kind of metaphor for the question of her life--will she spectacularly flame out and fade?
The story moves between discovery and despair as she grope to re-establish some kind of relationship with her aging mother separated from her husband early in the marriage, her ambitious brother who would turn the family land into a subdivision of tract homes, and her husband with whom she fails to reconcile. The story reaches a climax on the night Barbara gives birth, Sabrina sits her other children, and Leonard comes home to a drunken and distraught Sabrina. I will leave it to the reader to discover whether Sabrina flames out or survives and what this means for those around her.
The story, set in the late 1950s, explores the discontents of those who have achieved the American dream yet found it wanting. At another level, Stegner as a writer of "place", explores the changing landscape driven by car culture with its attendant freeways, suburban sprawl, growing pollution, and the destruction of natural habitats to make way for tract homes. While this latter element is in the backdrop, it also reveals the illusions and follies of the American dream and its inability to give us either good purposes or good places.
Torn between her New England family rectitude and her frustrations, she confesses her affair and yet refuses to utterly break it off, until she sees the other husband for who he is, one who won't sacrifice his family but wants a bit of something "on the side". Meanwhile the marriage continues to unravel and with this, Sabrina's life as she goes on an alcoholic binge, ends up sheltering in the home of a Tahoe dog-boarder, and finally comes home to her mother's house and the conflicts within her own family.
Underneath it all is the emptiness of Sabrina's life, rich, and idle, barren (until she discovers she is pregnant by the errant husband) and purposeless. She reconnects with her good friend, Barbara and her husband Leonard, who have worked their way up from poverty to respectable middle-class life in a new suburban community nearby. The book title comes from an evening spent with this family watching a meteor shower and seems a kind of metaphor for the question of her life--will she spectacularly flame out and fade?
The story moves between discovery and despair as she grope to re-establish some kind of relationship with her aging mother separated from her husband early in the marriage, her ambitious brother who would turn the family land into a subdivision of tract homes, and her husband with whom she fails to reconcile. The story reaches a climax on the night Barbara gives birth, Sabrina sits her other children, and Leonard comes home to a drunken and distraught Sabrina. I will leave it to the reader to discover whether Sabrina flames out or survives and what this means for those around her.
The story, set in the late 1950s, explores the discontents of those who have achieved the American dream yet found it wanting. At another level, Stegner as a writer of "place", explores the changing landscape driven by car culture with its attendant freeways, suburban sprawl, growing pollution, and the destruction of natural habitats to make way for tract homes. While this latter element is in the backdrop, it also reveals the illusions and follies of the American dream and its inability to give us either good purposes or good places.
August 10, 2010
“There. There was the day, all tidy like a drawer freshly arranged” (23).
“ ‘Good morning, Mrs. Hutchens. Sleep well?’
‘I should think it bad management…not to’” (23).
“ ‘Charm can be a very bad substitute for character’” (30).
“She had never seen him, even fully dressed, without feeling his masculinity like a violence” (35).
“He had the look of one whose enormous virility could beget and forget children with the same casualness” (36).
“ ‘Listen, I pay you the compliment of thinking you’re not stupid’” (39).
“For a moment she stood frowning, caught in the past as a woman is caught who steps into a grating with a spike heel” (42).
“Her head felt stuffed, the way a trophy head might feel after it had been cut off and its bones removed and its shape filled out with hot sand” (49).
“Closing the door, she felt that she imprisoned herself beyond hope in gloomy rooms, an Emily Dickinson without a gift” (49).
“…and went down the stairs past the glower of the generations” (145).
“A smell of outraged cereal arose” (205).
“She thought a little wildly that he looked like Woodrow Wilson about to scold someone” (222).
“Good God, Leonard thought, are we going to have him? I’ll eat windfall prunes in the orchard first” (240). **Wow. I want to use this one. Copiously. To an obnoxious point, I mean.
“Around him she always felt as if she were wearing loose clothes around a lot of factory wheels” (296).
“What a sneaky thing the mind was, how it could twist and turn, looking for any roadside where the garbage of blame could be thrown” (397).
The book had its good points, but Sabrina Castro, the main character, was so utterly unlikeable, it was difficult to care about her "problems."
“ ‘Good morning, Mrs. Hutchens. Sleep well?’
‘I should think it bad management…not to’” (23).
“ ‘Charm can be a very bad substitute for character’” (30).
“She had never seen him, even fully dressed, without feeling his masculinity like a violence” (35).
“He had the look of one whose enormous virility could beget and forget children with the same casualness” (36).
“ ‘Listen, I pay you the compliment of thinking you’re not stupid’” (39).
“For a moment she stood frowning, caught in the past as a woman is caught who steps into a grating with a spike heel” (42).
“Her head felt stuffed, the way a trophy head might feel after it had been cut off and its bones removed and its shape filled out with hot sand” (49).
“Closing the door, she felt that she imprisoned herself beyond hope in gloomy rooms, an Emily Dickinson without a gift” (49).
“…and went down the stairs past the glower of the generations” (145).
“A smell of outraged cereal arose” (205).
“She thought a little wildly that he looked like Woodrow Wilson about to scold someone” (222).
“Good God, Leonard thought, are we going to have him? I’ll eat windfall prunes in the orchard first” (240). **Wow. I want to use this one. Copiously. To an obnoxious point, I mean.
“Around him she always felt as if she were wearing loose clothes around a lot of factory wheels” (296).
“What a sneaky thing the mind was, how it could twist and turn, looking for any roadside where the garbage of blame could be thrown” (397).
The book had its good points, but Sabrina Castro, the main character, was so utterly unlikeable, it was difficult to care about her "problems."
February 2, 2011
An early (1961) Stegner; not the same literary "heft" as Crossing to Safety or Angle of Repose, but a glimpse of what's to come. Still, a sharp, keenly observed take on suburban California before the "real" '60's kicked in.
Updated 2/2: Finished the book and I'm glad I stuck with it. Very strong final 80 pages, with interesting and unexpected resolutions. Again, not Stegner's best--some characters were under-drawn, plot was a bit rambling-- but such a pleasure to read his marvelous prose.
Updated 2/2: Finished the book and I'm glad I stuck with it. Very strong final 80 pages, with interesting and unexpected resolutions. Again, not Stegner's best--some characters were under-drawn, plot was a bit rambling-- but such a pleasure to read his marvelous prose.
April 7, 2019
I started out trudging through this book like a fisherman in waders in hip-deep mud and almost abandoned it...until I got to the midway point when it suddenly improved. I don't know whether this was because of something that was going on with me or the book but it certainly got better once Sabrina Castro stopped her downward slide into stupidity.
5 stars, certainly, for Stegner's writing. I think I said this when I read Angle of Repose....it takes me a couple of chapters to get my head around his writing style. He is a dense, intellectual writer that really challenges a contemporary reader not used to this type of writing. For this reason, I like it all the more.
That said, 2 to 3 stars for this particular story. Personally, in Angle of Repose, I feel that Stegner was able to use a template of sorts for his main female character, Susan Burling Ward. He had the letters of Mary Hallock Foote to rely on. In these letters he had an authentic female voice that drove the story and gave an accurate reflection of what the character thought and felt at the time.
Sabrina Castro, on the other hand, is a modern female character and I think that without the authentic female voice that he was able to rely on in Angle of Repose, Stegner falls into the category of just another male writer writing a stereotyped female character without much depth.
3.5 stars leaning toward 4 for me overall.
5 stars, certainly, for Stegner's writing. I think I said this when I read Angle of Repose....it takes me a couple of chapters to get my head around his writing style. He is a dense, intellectual writer that really challenges a contemporary reader not used to this type of writing. For this reason, I like it all the more.
That said, 2 to 3 stars for this particular story. Personally, in Angle of Repose, I feel that Stegner was able to use a template of sorts for his main female character, Susan Burling Ward. He had the letters of Mary Hallock Foote to rely on. In these letters he had an authentic female voice that drove the story and gave an accurate reflection of what the character thought and felt at the time.
Sabrina Castro, on the other hand, is a modern female character and I think that without the authentic female voice that he was able to rely on in Angle of Repose, Stegner falls into the category of just another male writer writing a stereotyped female character without much depth.
3.5 stars leaning toward 4 for me overall.
August 24, 2014
An amazing work by Stegner. Is this man still remembered and valued so many years after he’s gone? He should be for in my view he is one of the finest writers of the 20th century. This novel takes place in the early 60’s in California. In the first pages Sabrina Castro announces to her husband that she’s had an affair while vacationing in Mexico. He doesn’t react the way she thought (hoped) he would; he’s contained and controlled, not showing the anger and anguish she expected. It was as if the worth she needs to feel about herself should have been affirmed by her husband’s reaction. It wasn’t and this enrages her. Sabrina feels guilty but conflicted by the affair, still attracted to her lover, but hoping her confession will bring on a crisis that will somehow relieve her unhappiness with her marriage. Her husband is a doctor who, she thinks, cares more about his practice than giving their marriage the time and substance she wants. This starts a downward spiral for Sabrina whose self-absorption and guilt propels her further and further into dissolution and dissipation.
Sabrina leaves her husband to return to her family home near San Francisco. Here we begin to see the family influences that have shaped her dysfunctional emotional make-up. Sabrina’s mother, Dorothy Hutchens, is exceedingly wealthy having come from an old family from New England whose ancestor a very long time ago made a fortune that the family has lived on since. Sabrina’s mother, Dorothy, is eccentric and disconnected with any semblance of modern life. She is obsessed with a sort of ancestor worship, constantly re-reading diaries and journals of her late relatives and looking at every aspect of life into the context of her forbearers. She is quite snobbish and has a view of proper moral behavior that is 19th century in tone. She has not been warm or nurturing to Sabrina, having always been more concerned about “proper” behavior and comportment than developing a deep, intimate mother-daughter relationship. Sabrina and she are not close and Sabrina resents her mother’s distance and hectoring demeanor.
What becomes clear, and I think this is at the heart of Sabrina’s psychological difficulties, is that the members of this family have for generations been of no substance or value. They have all lived lives without accomplishment or productive contribution to society. They were not morally dissolute, but hang on to an aristocratic ethos that made them self-satisfied in their superiority, but worthless to anyone. Dorothy’s sisters never married and a brother lived as a gentleman of leisure traveling around the world to fill the vacuum of his life. Dorothy married, but her family thought her husband was not worthy of their station so, after Dorothy produced some heirs, he vanished with some financial incentive from the family. Dorothy lives in isolation from a life of meaning; she writes piddling small checks to various oddball charities to satisfy her sense of nobless oblige. Dorothy has a companion/secretary, Helen Kretchmer, who is attentive to Mrs. Hutchens and takes the role of the loyal daughter that Sabrina never was.
Sabrina is as hollow as her mother and her ancestors, but unlike them she realizes it. Attractive and well-educated, she has nothing in her life that brings it any depth and fulfillment. Her husband is content with just having her around, not demanding much other than her presence. She is full of bitterness, self-loathing and guilt and expresses that by engaging in increasingly self-destructive behavior.
Contrasting Sabrina’s angst about how to live her life is her friend, Barbara. Barbara came from a family with some degree of means. She is married to Leonard, a high school teacher who refuses to use her family’s wealth for a life above his school teacher salary. Barbara has two children with a third on the way. She and Leonard have the kind of life that has eluded Sabrina, a mundane suburban existence that nonetheless has depth and meaningfulness. (Stegner’s depiction of suburbia, written in its heyday of the early 60’s, is brilliantly satirical.) In contrast to Barbara and Leonard, Sabrina is trapped in circumstances that, despite her looks and wealth, have left her completely unfulfilled and she doesn’t know how to right herself.
Her decline is a sort of journey through a personal hell, one that she has created and for which she can find no constructive way out. Her histrionics and self-destructive acts are the ways she tries to purge herself of her guilt and her emptiness. I suppose one is inclined to be sympathetic or empathetic with protagonists, but Stegner doesn’t expect us to be so. He wants us to understand what drives Sabrina’s behavior, but not to admire her.
By the end of the novel Sabrina has so thoroughly degraded herself that she makes a suicide gesture. There is an event (no spoiler here) that could take her completely down the path of self-destruction. Somehow this is cathartic and she reaches an accommodation with her life situation that may lead her to some inner peace. One isn’t left with strong confidence, but there’s a glimmer that she can find at least a measure of contentment.
Sabrina leaves her husband to return to her family home near San Francisco. Here we begin to see the family influences that have shaped her dysfunctional emotional make-up. Sabrina’s mother, Dorothy Hutchens, is exceedingly wealthy having come from an old family from New England whose ancestor a very long time ago made a fortune that the family has lived on since. Sabrina’s mother, Dorothy, is eccentric and disconnected with any semblance of modern life. She is obsessed with a sort of ancestor worship, constantly re-reading diaries and journals of her late relatives and looking at every aspect of life into the context of her forbearers. She is quite snobbish and has a view of proper moral behavior that is 19th century in tone. She has not been warm or nurturing to Sabrina, having always been more concerned about “proper” behavior and comportment than developing a deep, intimate mother-daughter relationship. Sabrina and she are not close and Sabrina resents her mother’s distance and hectoring demeanor.
What becomes clear, and I think this is at the heart of Sabrina’s psychological difficulties, is that the members of this family have for generations been of no substance or value. They have all lived lives without accomplishment or productive contribution to society. They were not morally dissolute, but hang on to an aristocratic ethos that made them self-satisfied in their superiority, but worthless to anyone. Dorothy’s sisters never married and a brother lived as a gentleman of leisure traveling around the world to fill the vacuum of his life. Dorothy married, but her family thought her husband was not worthy of their station so, after Dorothy produced some heirs, he vanished with some financial incentive from the family. Dorothy lives in isolation from a life of meaning; she writes piddling small checks to various oddball charities to satisfy her sense of nobless oblige. Dorothy has a companion/secretary, Helen Kretchmer, who is attentive to Mrs. Hutchens and takes the role of the loyal daughter that Sabrina never was.
Sabrina is as hollow as her mother and her ancestors, but unlike them she realizes it. Attractive and well-educated, she has nothing in her life that brings it any depth and fulfillment. Her husband is content with just having her around, not demanding much other than her presence. She is full of bitterness, self-loathing and guilt and expresses that by engaging in increasingly self-destructive behavior.
Contrasting Sabrina’s angst about how to live her life is her friend, Barbara. Barbara came from a family with some degree of means. She is married to Leonard, a high school teacher who refuses to use her family’s wealth for a life above his school teacher salary. Barbara has two children with a third on the way. She and Leonard have the kind of life that has eluded Sabrina, a mundane suburban existence that nonetheless has depth and meaningfulness. (Stegner’s depiction of suburbia, written in its heyday of the early 60’s, is brilliantly satirical.) In contrast to Barbara and Leonard, Sabrina is trapped in circumstances that, despite her looks and wealth, have left her completely unfulfilled and she doesn’t know how to right herself.
Her decline is a sort of journey through a personal hell, one that she has created and for which she can find no constructive way out. Her histrionics and self-destructive acts are the ways she tries to purge herself of her guilt and her emptiness. I suppose one is inclined to be sympathetic or empathetic with protagonists, but Stegner doesn’t expect us to be so. He wants us to understand what drives Sabrina’s behavior, but not to admire her.
By the end of the novel Sabrina has so thoroughly degraded herself that she makes a suicide gesture. There is an event (no spoiler here) that could take her completely down the path of self-destruction. Somehow this is cathartic and she reaches an accommodation with her life situation that may lead her to some inner peace. One isn’t left with strong confidence, but there’s a glimmer that she can find at least a measure of contentment.
March 2, 2018
Certainly not his best, but occasionally rises to genuine sublimity.
April 24, 2024
Apparently this is early Stegner, but the writing is incredible so he must have only improved with time. I appreciated how each chapter was a self contained story, and not microscopically focused only on Sabrina, but of those around her as well.
May 16, 2016
I read A Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner for at least the third time. I first read it in 1971 when I was new to California. It was interesting to read in a work of fiction about the locale that I was now living in. Few books are written about southwestern Michigan but the San Francisco Bay Area figures prominently in the news, movies and books. Sabrina is a self indulgent drama queen who is doing everything "bad" she can think of to either deconstruct or get the attention of her mother and husband. But because this book was published in 1961 and she supposedly has an inbred New England Puritan conscience her "bad" consists mainly of drinking a lot of alcohol and having an affair while still married. She isn't overly likeable but there are sparks where she seems OK as in her treatment of her friend's children and dogs. She is nowhere near as "bad" as her brother Oliver who seems to have that frat boy, rich kid sense of arrogance and entitlement we see in Trump and earlier in the Kennedy men. "His wants had never conflicted with any fine scruples." Stegner in his fame as a writer and life at Stanford seems to have stumbled upon people from inherited wealth as his book Crossing to Safety also had the rich/poor conflict. His mixed feelings about these people sometimes comes out in his prose. The relationship problems are real and don't change from generation to generation so what happens to Sabrina and her husband could still happen in this century. Other than having to find a pay phone and drinking and smoking through pregnancy, not much has changed. It is still a good book, although I am not sure it is worth reading 3x. I'm still interested in what life in California was like pre-1970. In the beginning of the book she couldn't scoot up Highway 5 because it was still 99 and passing through Bakersfield and Fresno so she took the hill route through Taft. Bet she didn't wear seatbelts either!
February 19, 2017
Aaaaaaaagh!!! I can't take it anymore!! Dated, misogynistic, just plain bad.
January 15, 2012
I adore Wallace Stegner's writing but this book was quite a disappointment. It was written in 1961 and appears very dated now. Sabrina Castra is a wealthy, unfulfilled, hard drinking hysterical young woman. She is self-destructive, miserable, proud and unforgiving. Her mother (who comes from OLD east coast money) is elderly, ill, arrogant and indulges in a sick kind of ancestor worship. (Inviting friends over to read from her ancestor's diaries while she dresses in their old clothes. Icky!) Sabrina's brother is a tightly coiled snake. He's animalistic and power hungry. The best friend and her husband are the too-good-to-be-true poor folks. Sound soap-opera-ish? It is.
Still, Stegner was a master of keen observation and writes great character studies. Too bad this story wasn't stronger.
Good quote: "It seemed to her she had never loved anything in her life. Love in her had been a demand, an anger, a hostility, a challenge, a greed."
Still, Stegner was a master of keen observation and writes great character studies. Too bad this story wasn't stronger.
Good quote: "It seemed to her she had never loved anything in her life. Love in her had been a demand, an anger, a hostility, a challenge, a greed."
March 25, 2009
While I typically love Stegner, this book was quite painful to finish. He is a brilliant writer and is a very skilled storyteller, however this book was very pointless and boring. It is about a woman who had an affair and goes home to her extremely wealthy mother and tries to fix her life but doesn’t quite know how to do it because she has been spoiled her whole life. The story weaves some other issues into the fabric of the story but I was very disappointed with its overall effectiveness. I really struggled to get into the story and had to force myself to finish. I would not recommend this story to anyone and couldn’t find anything valuable for my students. Overall I felt this was a waste of two, almost three, weeks of reading.
August 19, 2024
I love Wallace Stegner BUT his characterization of a woman is sadly lacking. Even really really good writers who are straight white dudes probably shouldn’t try to take on a female pov. You think you know, but guess what? You don’t! And close is almost worse than way off.
In other ways this novel got pretty bogged down, lots of hand wringing, not a lot of plot. An MC who was apparently rich and bored, so cheated on her husband and almost immediately regretted it. I got the feeling WS didn’t know what to do with her. There was a moment at the end where she practically throws herself at her best friend’s husband which was absolutely preposterous.
I will say I’m relieved to have finished, though I didn’t hate it.
In other ways this novel got pretty bogged down, lots of hand wringing, not a lot of plot. An MC who was apparently rich and bored, so cheated on her husband and almost immediately regretted it. I got the feeling WS didn’t know what to do with her. There was a moment at the end where she practically throws herself at her best friend’s husband which was absolutely preposterous.
I will say I’m relieved to have finished, though I didn’t hate it.
March 9, 2013
Have you ever had an acquaintance whose life seems to be forever on the dung heap? Years pass, and every single time you try to spend time with her, she treats you to a litany of her miseries-- and never seems to have anything to say about having tried anything new to get herself out of that monumental funk?
That's the friend that this book is all about. Stegner describes his heroine's surroundings in gorgeous prose, but bottom line is: she's whiny, horrifically selfdestructive and just a bummer to be around.
That's the friend that this book is all about. Stegner describes his heroine's surroundings in gorgeous prose, but bottom line is: she's whiny, horrifically selfdestructive and just a bummer to be around.
April 3, 2013
I read this book after reading "Crossing to Safety" because I enjoyed Stegner's writing style. This book was written earlier in his career and was "okay" although at times a bit verbose and long winded. I got through it so I could next read his Pulitzer prize work "Angle of Repose".
this book kept me riveted in places and antsy in other places, but I am happy to have read it. Sometimes it is just a great way of accessing the genius of a novelist at different times in his life.
this book kept me riveted in places and antsy in other places, but I am happy to have read it. Sometimes it is just a great way of accessing the genius of a novelist at different times in his life.
January 28, 2014
Lots of Stegner fans have panned this book. Apparently, even Stegner disliked it. It featured a spoiled, self centered rich woman as it's MC and a trite storyline with preachy undertones. But c'mon, it's Stegner after all and his insights into humanity and his love of the physical space rescues a melodrama into a fairly lovely read.
January 4, 2012
Stegner's attempt at a high-society novel. Weaker for the attempt to look inside of a social class and gender he was much less equipped to write about, the novel still contains the beautiful naturalistic prose and eye for detail Stegner is a master of.
July 7, 2014
I just don't know how WS knows females so well! I loved reading this on stormy summer days and I'm none too pleased that I could identify (sometimes) with Sabrina's anxieties and doubts. I can't imagine finding a Stegner work that I don't enjoy.
January 12, 2019
3.5 This was a long slog through a book whose characters I didn’t really like, in situations that were mostly irritating. And yet I kept reading til the end and even enjoyed it. I guess that’s what’s called good writing.
March 15, 2014
Beautifully written and totally modern, even though it was published over 50 years ago. Wallace Stegner is truly one of the Great American Authors.
August 18, 2012
this is the 2nd story from stegner for me...the 1st, his Crossing to Safety, and that fairly recent, within the last year or two. this one has what...29 reviews here?...i've only glanced at them...later maybe.
this one (published 1961) begins:
except for an occasional dry question, he left the talking to her, waiting while she fought out the difficult words. it was as if he applied a pump: she could feel the content of her insides, discolored and poisonous, being exposed to his laboratory scrutiny. if he had said anything--anything!--to indicate that he felt as a wronged husband should feel. but that controlled suspension of judgement, that look not critical but only clinical, as if the gross symptoms of treachery were to be gathered together objectively like the symptoms of peptic ulcers. any distress before or after eating? any blood in the stools?
in the middle of it the telephone rang. he excused himself and left her--it felt like being left in an obstetrical chair--and when he returned he said in his dry and level voice that they would have to postpone it, he had to go out on a call.
okee-dokee, then...onward & upward.
i like how the story opens...burke, a doctor ten years older than his wife, sabrina, argue...sabrina has been telling him, apparently, about an affair she had w/a man named bernard...at monte alban...and when the phone rings calling the doctor out, she is upset that he must leave and exits the house before he does...getting in her convertible and booking it...down the night highway...and there is an extended dialogue she has w/her reflection in the windshield.
place(s)
pasdena...monte alban...oaxaca...the grapevine, 6-lanes wide, the road to taft, coalinga, u.s. 33...palo alto...near san francisco airport, san mateo, carson city-nevada,
subject matter
marriage, adultery...sabrina wonders if burke would play the understanding role the script called for...considers arabia, where she'd be stoned to death.
characters
burke castro, a doctor, ten years older than his wife
sabrina (hutchens) castro, 35-year-old, his wife, no children, apparently she can't
bernard mendelsohn, some guy with whom sabrina had a 10-day affair, works in san francisco, is a buyer for a department store, lives in stonestown, has 3 children, the oldest is 16
barbara macdonald...a friend of sabrina, who coined the term, 'spitbacks' for men like chocolates, pushing a thumb thru the bottom and biting off a corner to see if you like...putting them back if not
deborah barber hutchens,sabrina's mother, lives in hillsborough/palo alto, was married 30 years ago to a man who was bought off, $250,000 to leave, was married 7 years, has the two children, grown now, sabrina and oliver, has a personal maid, a butler, a cook, a companion, a driver, and nine gardeners.
lizardo, sabrina's mother's...man/butler/servant
virgil...another servant
great-grandmother wolcott...of sabrina
john singer sergent, painted sabrina's mother
grandmother emily wolcott barber
frank duveneck, painted emily
speicher, painted sabrina at age 6
helen kretchmer...replaced mrs. brill...is a companion to rich deborah barber hutchens
larry keams, a boy from sabrina's past, dartmouth fresh-m from boston
oliver hutchens, 2 years older, brother to sabrina, married to minna, 5 children
krishna lal, some swami guy who wants deborah's money
collier, a banker
leonard macdonald high school english teacher husband of barb
norma, bernard's wife, past 40
leonard's unnamed brother in the pokey
and a brother, possible the same one, doug
two san mateo highway patrolmen
dolly & louise macdonald, the 2 children
walt...helen's beau, stationed in the aleutians
chars, major/minor, ass. w/chap 2, debrah
virgil
dr sanders
sue whiteside
mercer, her mother's brother
hugh, married to sue whiteside
barbara macdonald
auntie grace, her mother's sister
oliver and minna, her son and his wife
bernadette, her maid
mr cantelli
aunt sarah, another of her her mother's sisters
tony
miss burkes...some sort of school...?
great uncle bushrod, oldest brother of her mother, became feelthy reech
her husband, never named at this point, chapter 2
chars ass. w/the reading of emily's diary
a young man who wrote poetry...copied verse of others, apparently, and provided it to emily...shortly before he went mad
george hollis...a love interest of emily's...her competition, harriet
harriet blaney
peggy bigelow
priscilla tyler
emma lacey
it's a small world, after all
having just read East of Eden from John Steinbeck...there is a chuckle on page 14 as sabrina, tearing up the road in california, meets "only occasional semis bringing down lettuce from salinas..." lettuce and getting that product to market is an item in steinbeck's story. heh!
chap 1
burke castro and his wife, sabrina in the opening scene, discussing sabrina's 10-day romance w/another man in mexico...burke receives a call--he is a doctor and must leave--sabrina does not like it, exits first, gets in her convertible, and drives from pasadena to her mother's house in palo alto/hillsborough...sees lizardo, her mother's butler, helen kretchmer, her mother's companion
chap 2
sabrina's mother's chapter, deborah barber hutchens, a feelthy reech woman, planning her day, 1st accounts, 2nd eye exercies, 3rd golf, 4th luncheon, 5th nap, 6th diaries, 7th tea.
chap 3
helen, deborah's companion, in the garden, recalling oliver hutchens, the 1st time she met him, "she had never seen him, even fully dressed, without feeling his masculinity like a violence." she recalls conversations with him, his interest in stopping his mother from giving too-much money away, with the help of collier at the bank, his desire that she, too, keep watch and warn him of cash-flow.
chap4
sabrina wakes, finds a pair of squaw boots in her old closet, still there, a gift from larry keams, a dartmouth freshman from boston, copy boy for the chronicle...whom she took an interest in...puts on boots, meets barbara/bobbi macdonald, unwanted pregnancy and barrel-shaped in the hallway, taking some dresses away, loaned from deborah. she enters the room where her mother, deborah, sue whiteside, and helen are reading emily's diaries from 80 years ago.
chap5
deborah, in period costume, w/sue whiteside (whose husband is somewhat of an invalid or otherwise incapacitated) & helen, her companion...reading emily's diaries, commenting on the going's-on of that time, the words used, duckin and jol...sabrina enters in the moccasins her mother despises, discussion, sabrina wonders when burke will call...asks lizardo for some of his whiskey
chap 6
a viewing of an old family film has taken place, oliver presenting the film to family, received from his now-dead father's 2nd wife, or at least, the woman the man had been living with for the last 20 years...his intent to see his reaction of his mother...so hamlet-like...oliver tells sabrina that their father is dead, on hawaii, that he'd been bought off w/$250,000 by grandmother and mercer...sabrina is still waiting for burke (in pasadena) to call...and since he has not, she calls bernard in san francisco...he calls her "mr. hanks" as he, too, is married...they arrange a meeting near the airport.
a note about the narration
having just completed a read of steinbeck's, East of Eden, a long tome--some 6-700 pages, and having been immersed in that plain style--steinbeck presents ideas in dialogue, there is action, scene description, little in the way of interior monologue...this is a change, coming on this story, as stegner presents much of the story w/characters--mainly sabrina--alone in her car, alone in her old bedroom, w/interior monologue.
there are some scenes, to date, up through chapter 6, that are a hoot...the diary-reading chapter...too, helen's recall of her meeting oliver...short descriptions, dialogue, a bit of action here there--oliver jumping into the pool and swimming across, tarzan-like, getting out to stand dripping over helen...
too, that use of the diary is interesting...some more of the ole meta-fiction? it is funny because deborah has them all...or at least her, in period costume and jewelry, and this is so much like the ole story-within-a-story device that has been used to great effect by so many.
a dendum, added after 30+ chapters: stegner presents much of the story w/two characters on stage...does little in the way of stage dressing...a room, the pool, at the macdonald house, in deborah's room...there are few times when more than two characters are on stage...although the meteor gazing in the macdonalds' back-yard is a nice story.
chap 7
sabrina in her car drives to meet bernard in his car near the airport...on a hill overlooking the airport, the bay, hunter's point. "you're an importer of japanese woolens and you have to leave on a midnight plane," he tells her...they get in the proverbial back seat, the proverbial cops stop, shine lights--but they are already dressed.
norma is bernard's wife, past 40...
"this was where modern love brought you: to a lover's lane where in the desperate constriction of a back seat, in a car parked among beer cans and kleenex and discarded condoms of clerks and students and juvenile delinquents and the emotionally and sexually dispossessed, you dispelled the fiction that you were much better, much different, or even more fastidious."
bernard heads out one way, sabrina heads to her mother's in another direction, and the police another...sabrina heads for san mateo to talk to barbara
chap 8
tract homes...greenwood acres...signs...streets named after shrubs...sabrina drives thru, can't find barbara and leonard's home the 1st time...2nd pass, yes...
the fog lay over the whole peninsula, over the whole of california, over the whole of america, over the whole of the twentieth century, like the sea over lost atlantis...
forked channels of wet is nice, a description of a road sign on a wet night...respectable darkness
two books on the macdonald's table, real?...the child from one to six and Waiting for Godot
leonard: "the slightest deviation down here makes you a character. a tract is the best of all possible places for individualism to flourish." leonard makes $4,800 a year as a high school english teacher...this story from 1961...sums and gas prices are always a hoot...and a bit of a shock.
sabrina: "if you were born in heaven and know it's a fraud, there's no place to go but hell..."
sabrina: "maybe your self is only there for the making of other selves..."
when sabrina leaves the macdonalds to return to her mother's place, it is late the door is locked, lizardo opens it immediately...burke is there, waiting for her.
this chapter must be one...where at least one reviewer saw a kind of preaching...about tract homes...leonard's defense of same...the ole "open-space" debate that has become the fashion....1961, this...
chap 9
burke & sabrina...burke flew in...to san francisco...and this is a hoot because sabrina and bernard had met in the dark of night near the airport...in fact, they were in the back seat, probably, as bernard was landing, flying in from pasedena. ha! or ho!
sabrina to burke: it must be wonderful to feel so blameless!"
they have a long talk, seem to reconcile to the idea...sabrina needs the proverbial time...she hopes in the shower, when she comes out, burke is there on his knees, burying his face in her conundrum...and she says, no! i was with him!...take my car...he leaves.
chap10
sabrina wakes...interior monologue chapter...she goes to her mother's room...says to someone, "air of knowing in advance what my answer will be is...baiting." okay, no, deborah, her mother says this to sabrina
sabrina peels out in a car provided to her by virgil, one of the manservants of deborah...do not covet thy neighbor's manservant, nor his ass, nor anything else that is thy neighbor's.
chap 11
...sabrina asks lizardo is any calls...she seems to want burke to call her, to take her back....barbara comes over with louise and dolly, her daughters.
chap 12
sabrina & barbara...bernard/sabrina phone call...lizardo is filipino...was wondering...the last read, east of eden, the trask's cook is chinese...both stories do stuff w/the lingo. his girl is estrella...sabrina goes to bernard's house...fatal attractions, cue the soundtrack...drive by, approaches door...michale douglas and cloria leachman, was it?
chap 13
restaurant...sabrina, oliver...hearing two boys, flit? castrato?...addie mcallister's ranch...they are in carson city, nevada, and sabrina will elect to stay on
folk tradition...folklore
blue doors in mexico, she remembered, were supposed to keep witches away...sabrina, considering bernard's blue door...something here she sees in nevada.
sabrina has a dog, fat boy...
chap 14
barbara & leonard macdonald.
leonard has been indexing books,papers, of the wealthy deborah...for $30/day...good pay, i take it, in 1961...money and prices, said, always a hoot.
a bit of comedic relief here, as leonard describes an "in-step" editor. he heh!
chap 15
oliver-deborah
sell part of estate...oliver argues the costs of labor...oliver-helen...lizardo, burk calls...oliver-burke...sabrina is missing...(in carson city)...
chap 16
the member from petaluma...and sabrina...who jumped his bones in a bar...on a bender...sabrina calls bernard...at 4 a.m....he hangs up on her. sabrina goes to charlie grulich's boarding kennel.
chapter 17
leonard macdonald...heh, there is something about kids building a treehouse without a permit...sounds like "neighborhood association" though that label is not used...morning at the macdonald house..dolly and louise....i think they provide barbara breakfast in bed.
chap 18
stream of consciousness...sabrina...staying on at the grulich boarding kennels...there for a week or more..."she became aware of how she was twisting to throw the blame on burke..."
this is where she got her dog, fat boy...ch berndorff von berndorff...
she comes in out of the rain, burke and oliver are there, having hired a detective to track her down...it is "henderson from petaluma"...the man she jumped on...she is judging burke's actions, words...he is not measuring up to what she wants..."unless a move means love it won't do."
sabrina grudges burke, "he felt no guilt himself."....there is no touch between them...something she desires...burke is aloof, clinical, and she seems benton punishing him for her indiscretion as herself..
chapter 19
leonard in the library, cataloging books/papers...then sabrina comes in...later, at dinner, deborah asks leonard about giving 400 acres for a park
chapter 20
at the macdonald house...leonard, sabrina, louise/dolly, barbara...meteor shower, that they watch from the dark of the back yard, lying on their backs...leonard is asked and tells his daughters a story...nice...sabrina leaves at the end...thanks for "letting me in."
chap 21
helen
she thinks of walt...is that a first? perhaps...at night, hot, walks out to the pool, gets nakkid, goes in the pool, oliver comes bee-bopping out in his birt-suit...panic...she's in the pool, he enters the other end...dark dark...oooo...he hits the lights as she scrambles for the dressing room.
chapter 22
oliver and the horses...he rides one...he sees a couple guys w/a station wagon, blue-prints...designs...
chapter 23
leonard/barbara macdonald...leonard asks about all the gifts that sabrina has graced them with...he wants them to stop...
chap 24
mrs. hutchens (deborah) & helen...deb wants to know how much $ will be owed leonard for his indexing/cataloging of the family papers...$700...23 days i think he says at one point, at $30/day...deb says/tells helen to make it for an even thousand and she is hurt, wondering, as the song goes, what about me! it isn't fair!...later, deb tells helen to write herself a check for three-grand...we get a scene of helen writing checks and we are provided w/the first names of many of the servants.
edelberto lizardo
bernadette burger
martha daley, no relation, i bet, to the famous fort dearborn mayor
virgil stillman
then, helen writes to walt again, her serviceman honey, stationed in the aleutians...she is also given a gift of gloves from the boxes of stuff the old maids kept...which tear along the seams as she pulls one on...80-year-old gloves...you can't take it with you and things fall apart if you leave it behind.
chap 25
sabrina...hating bernard, contempt...nice, to see the change of character...she's gone from him being her everything to the 9th circle of hell...she questions burke...interior stream of con...later, she asks her mother for her dog...to bring him there...counting mexico, it has been two months separation..
...sabrina/her mother deborah, mrs. hutchens, talk...sabrina says she got from burke "12 years of decorative nothing..." he put her through while he developed the fanciest practice in pasadena.
...sabrina is not drinking/smoking...for a month now...indication of...what? pregs? possibly
...her mother offers two letters to place in the archive...to be opened in the year 2000...like twain almost, hey?....when her mother cries, sabrina does not comfort, or console her...she no can touch her mother anymore than burke touches her.
...she writes a telegram to burke...she has hopes (about burke) secret fears...her telegram says nothing more than 'send fat boy'
chap 26
helen...reads in the paper that 380 acres near woodside...deborah hutchens's property...will be developed...117 luxury homes, 4 developers, chester webber of webber enterprises and oliver among them...homes at $60,000 to $110,000...big bucks in 1961
helen/oliver discuss this...oliver wants to see deborah's checkbook...looks himself, wants the 3g back
chap 27
sabrina...letter from burke...will be filing for a reno divorce...will send fat boy
oliver/sabrina talk of mother and land
chap 28
helen, leaving deb's room...helen/sabrina talk...sabrina/deborah...sabrina to barbara's
chap 29
sabrina considers an abortionist...sabrina/oliver...long talk...100 acres for a park she gets, plus 20 acres for mother...sabrina/helen...helen is forced to keep the 3 grand check...will be gone shortly per oliver's demands.
chap 30
barbara/sabrina...sabrina is pregnant...& drinking...sabrina talks of money, necessity..having money makes you too free...weirdness, talks of ghouls, that killer from wisconsin who hung women by their heels...eating children, speaks of a cat she saw, eating its young...barbara labor...baby on way
chap 31
oliver stream-con...male baby...then leonard/sabrina...sabrina almost gets nakkid before oliver...oops.
chap 32
this one (published 1961) begins:
except for an occasional dry question, he left the talking to her, waiting while she fought out the difficult words. it was as if he applied a pump: she could feel the content of her insides, discolored and poisonous, being exposed to his laboratory scrutiny. if he had said anything--anything!--to indicate that he felt as a wronged husband should feel. but that controlled suspension of judgement, that look not critical but only clinical, as if the gross symptoms of treachery were to be gathered together objectively like the symptoms of peptic ulcers. any distress before or after eating? any blood in the stools?
in the middle of it the telephone rang. he excused himself and left her--it felt like being left in an obstetrical chair--and when he returned he said in his dry and level voice that they would have to postpone it, he had to go out on a call.
okee-dokee, then...onward & upward.
i like how the story opens...burke, a doctor ten years older than his wife, sabrina, argue...sabrina has been telling him, apparently, about an affair she had w/a man named bernard...at monte alban...and when the phone rings calling the doctor out, she is upset that he must leave and exits the house before he does...getting in her convertible and booking it...down the night highway...and there is an extended dialogue she has w/her reflection in the windshield.
place(s)
pasdena...monte alban...oaxaca...the grapevine, 6-lanes wide, the road to taft, coalinga, u.s. 33...palo alto...near san francisco airport, san mateo, carson city-nevada,
subject matter
marriage, adultery...sabrina wonders if burke would play the understanding role the script called for...considers arabia, where she'd be stoned to death.
characters
burke castro, a doctor, ten years older than his wife
sabrina (hutchens) castro, 35-year-old, his wife, no children, apparently she can't
bernard mendelsohn, some guy with whom sabrina had a 10-day affair, works in san francisco, is a buyer for a department store, lives in stonestown, has 3 children, the oldest is 16
barbara macdonald...a friend of sabrina, who coined the term, 'spitbacks' for men like chocolates, pushing a thumb thru the bottom and biting off a corner to see if you like...putting them back if not
deborah barber hutchens,sabrina's mother, lives in hillsborough/palo alto, was married 30 years ago to a man who was bought off, $250,000 to leave, was married 7 years, has the two children, grown now, sabrina and oliver, has a personal maid, a butler, a cook, a companion, a driver, and nine gardeners.
lizardo, sabrina's mother's...man/butler/servant
virgil...another servant
great-grandmother wolcott...of sabrina
john singer sergent, painted sabrina's mother
grandmother emily wolcott barber
frank duveneck, painted emily
speicher, painted sabrina at age 6
helen kretchmer...replaced mrs. brill...is a companion to rich deborah barber hutchens
larry keams, a boy from sabrina's past, dartmouth fresh-m from boston
oliver hutchens, 2 years older, brother to sabrina, married to minna, 5 children
krishna lal, some swami guy who wants deborah's money
collier, a banker
leonard macdonald high school english teacher husband of barb
norma, bernard's wife, past 40
leonard's unnamed brother in the pokey
and a brother, possible the same one, doug
two san mateo highway patrolmen
dolly & louise macdonald, the 2 children
walt...helen's beau, stationed in the aleutians
chars, major/minor, ass. w/chap 2, debrah
virgil
dr sanders
sue whiteside
mercer, her mother's brother
hugh, married to sue whiteside
barbara macdonald
auntie grace, her mother's sister
oliver and minna, her son and his wife
bernadette, her maid
mr cantelli
aunt sarah, another of her her mother's sisters
tony
miss burkes...some sort of school...?
great uncle bushrod, oldest brother of her mother, became feelthy reech
her husband, never named at this point, chapter 2
chars ass. w/the reading of emily's diary
a young man who wrote poetry...copied verse of others, apparently, and provided it to emily...shortly before he went mad
george hollis...a love interest of emily's...her competition, harriet
harriet blaney
peggy bigelow
priscilla tyler
emma lacey
it's a small world, after all
having just read East of Eden from John Steinbeck...there is a chuckle on page 14 as sabrina, tearing up the road in california, meets "only occasional semis bringing down lettuce from salinas..." lettuce and getting that product to market is an item in steinbeck's story. heh!
chap 1
burke castro and his wife, sabrina in the opening scene, discussing sabrina's 10-day romance w/another man in mexico...burke receives a call--he is a doctor and must leave--sabrina does not like it, exits first, gets in her convertible, and drives from pasadena to her mother's house in palo alto/hillsborough...sees lizardo, her mother's butler, helen kretchmer, her mother's companion
chap 2
sabrina's mother's chapter, deborah barber hutchens, a feelthy reech woman, planning her day, 1st accounts, 2nd eye exercies, 3rd golf, 4th luncheon, 5th nap, 6th diaries, 7th tea.
chap 3
helen, deborah's companion, in the garden, recalling oliver hutchens, the 1st time she met him, "she had never seen him, even fully dressed, without feeling his masculinity like a violence." she recalls conversations with him, his interest in stopping his mother from giving too-much money away, with the help of collier at the bank, his desire that she, too, keep watch and warn him of cash-flow.
chap4
sabrina wakes, finds a pair of squaw boots in her old closet, still there, a gift from larry keams, a dartmouth freshman from boston, copy boy for the chronicle...whom she took an interest in...puts on boots, meets barbara/bobbi macdonald, unwanted pregnancy and barrel-shaped in the hallway, taking some dresses away, loaned from deborah. she enters the room where her mother, deborah, sue whiteside, and helen are reading emily's diaries from 80 years ago.
chap5
deborah, in period costume, w/sue whiteside (whose husband is somewhat of an invalid or otherwise incapacitated) & helen, her companion...reading emily's diaries, commenting on the going's-on of that time, the words used, duckin and jol...sabrina enters in the moccasins her mother despises, discussion, sabrina wonders when burke will call...asks lizardo for some of his whiskey
chap 6
a viewing of an old family film has taken place, oliver presenting the film to family, received from his now-dead father's 2nd wife, or at least, the woman the man had been living with for the last 20 years...his intent to see his reaction of his mother...so hamlet-like...oliver tells sabrina that their father is dead, on hawaii, that he'd been bought off w/$250,000 by grandmother and mercer...sabrina is still waiting for burke (in pasadena) to call...and since he has not, she calls bernard in san francisco...he calls her "mr. hanks" as he, too, is married...they arrange a meeting near the airport.
a note about the narration
having just completed a read of steinbeck's, East of Eden, a long tome--some 6-700 pages, and having been immersed in that plain style--steinbeck presents ideas in dialogue, there is action, scene description, little in the way of interior monologue...this is a change, coming on this story, as stegner presents much of the story w/characters--mainly sabrina--alone in her car, alone in her old bedroom, w/interior monologue.
there are some scenes, to date, up through chapter 6, that are a hoot...the diary-reading chapter...too, helen's recall of her meeting oliver...short descriptions, dialogue, a bit of action here there--oliver jumping into the pool and swimming across, tarzan-like, getting out to stand dripping over helen...
too, that use of the diary is interesting...some more of the ole meta-fiction? it is funny because deborah has them all...or at least her, in period costume and jewelry, and this is so much like the ole story-within-a-story device that has been used to great effect by so many.
a dendum, added after 30+ chapters: stegner presents much of the story w/two characters on stage...does little in the way of stage dressing...a room, the pool, at the macdonald house, in deborah's room...there are few times when more than two characters are on stage...although the meteor gazing in the macdonalds' back-yard is a nice story.
chap 7
sabrina in her car drives to meet bernard in his car near the airport...on a hill overlooking the airport, the bay, hunter's point. "you're an importer of japanese woolens and you have to leave on a midnight plane," he tells her...they get in the proverbial back seat, the proverbial cops stop, shine lights--but they are already dressed.
norma is bernard's wife, past 40...
"this was where modern love brought you: to a lover's lane where in the desperate constriction of a back seat, in a car parked among beer cans and kleenex and discarded condoms of clerks and students and juvenile delinquents and the emotionally and sexually dispossessed, you dispelled the fiction that you were much better, much different, or even more fastidious."
bernard heads out one way, sabrina heads to her mother's in another direction, and the police another...sabrina heads for san mateo to talk to barbara
chap 8
tract homes...greenwood acres...signs...streets named after shrubs...sabrina drives thru, can't find barbara and leonard's home the 1st time...2nd pass, yes...
the fog lay over the whole peninsula, over the whole of california, over the whole of america, over the whole of the twentieth century, like the sea over lost atlantis...
forked channels of wet is nice, a description of a road sign on a wet night...respectable darkness
two books on the macdonald's table, real?...the child from one to six and Waiting for Godot
leonard: "the slightest deviation down here makes you a character. a tract is the best of all possible places for individualism to flourish." leonard makes $4,800 a year as a high school english teacher...this story from 1961...sums and gas prices are always a hoot...and a bit of a shock.
sabrina: "if you were born in heaven and know it's a fraud, there's no place to go but hell..."
sabrina: "maybe your self is only there for the making of other selves..."
when sabrina leaves the macdonalds to return to her mother's place, it is late the door is locked, lizardo opens it immediately...burke is there, waiting for her.
this chapter must be one...where at least one reviewer saw a kind of preaching...about tract homes...leonard's defense of same...the ole "open-space" debate that has become the fashion....1961, this...
chap 9
burke & sabrina...burke flew in...to san francisco...and this is a hoot because sabrina and bernard had met in the dark of night near the airport...in fact, they were in the back seat, probably, as bernard was landing, flying in from pasedena. ha! or ho!
sabrina to burke: it must be wonderful to feel so blameless!"
they have a long talk, seem to reconcile to the idea...sabrina needs the proverbial time...she hopes in the shower, when she comes out, burke is there on his knees, burying his face in her conundrum...and she says, no! i was with him!...take my car...he leaves.
chap10
sabrina wakes...interior monologue chapter...she goes to her mother's room...says to someone, "air of knowing in advance what my answer will be is...baiting." okay, no, deborah, her mother says this to sabrina
sabrina peels out in a car provided to her by virgil, one of the manservants of deborah...do not covet thy neighbor's manservant, nor his ass, nor anything else that is thy neighbor's.
chap 11
...sabrina asks lizardo is any calls...she seems to want burke to call her, to take her back....barbara comes over with louise and dolly, her daughters.
chap 12
sabrina & barbara...bernard/sabrina phone call...lizardo is filipino...was wondering...the last read, east of eden, the trask's cook is chinese...both stories do stuff w/the lingo. his girl is estrella...sabrina goes to bernard's house...fatal attractions, cue the soundtrack...drive by, approaches door...michale douglas and cloria leachman, was it?
chap 13
restaurant...sabrina, oliver...hearing two boys, flit? castrato?...addie mcallister's ranch...they are in carson city, nevada, and sabrina will elect to stay on
folk tradition...folklore
blue doors in mexico, she remembered, were supposed to keep witches away...sabrina, considering bernard's blue door...something here she sees in nevada.
sabrina has a dog, fat boy...
chap 14
barbara & leonard macdonald.
leonard has been indexing books,papers, of the wealthy deborah...for $30/day...good pay, i take it, in 1961...money and prices, said, always a hoot.
a bit of comedic relief here, as leonard describes an "in-step" editor. he heh!
chap 15
oliver-deborah
sell part of estate...oliver argues the costs of labor...oliver-helen...lizardo, burk calls...oliver-burke...sabrina is missing...(in carson city)...
chap 16
the member from petaluma...and sabrina...who jumped his bones in a bar...on a bender...sabrina calls bernard...at 4 a.m....he hangs up on her. sabrina goes to charlie grulich's boarding kennel.
chapter 17
leonard macdonald...heh, there is something about kids building a treehouse without a permit...sounds like "neighborhood association" though that label is not used...morning at the macdonald house..dolly and louise....i think they provide barbara breakfast in bed.
chap 18
stream of consciousness...sabrina...staying on at the grulich boarding kennels...there for a week or more..."she became aware of how she was twisting to throw the blame on burke..."
this is where she got her dog, fat boy...ch berndorff von berndorff...
she comes in out of the rain, burke and oliver are there, having hired a detective to track her down...it is "henderson from petaluma"...the man she jumped on...she is judging burke's actions, words...he is not measuring up to what she wants..."unless a move means love it won't do."
sabrina grudges burke, "he felt no guilt himself."....there is no touch between them...something she desires...burke is aloof, clinical, and she seems benton punishing him for her indiscretion as herself..
chapter 19
leonard in the library, cataloging books/papers...then sabrina comes in...later, at dinner, deborah asks leonard about giving 400 acres for a park
chapter 20
at the macdonald house...leonard, sabrina, louise/dolly, barbara...meteor shower, that they watch from the dark of the back yard, lying on their backs...leonard is asked and tells his daughters a story...nice...sabrina leaves at the end...thanks for "letting me in."
chap 21
helen
she thinks of walt...is that a first? perhaps...at night, hot, walks out to the pool, gets nakkid, goes in the pool, oliver comes bee-bopping out in his birt-suit...panic...she's in the pool, he enters the other end...dark dark...oooo...he hits the lights as she scrambles for the dressing room.
chapter 22
oliver and the horses...he rides one...he sees a couple guys w/a station wagon, blue-prints...designs...
chapter 23
leonard/barbara macdonald...leonard asks about all the gifts that sabrina has graced them with...he wants them to stop...
chap 24
mrs. hutchens (deborah) & helen...deb wants to know how much $ will be owed leonard for his indexing/cataloging of the family papers...$700...23 days i think he says at one point, at $30/day...deb says/tells helen to make it for an even thousand and she is hurt, wondering, as the song goes, what about me! it isn't fair!...later, deb tells helen to write herself a check for three-grand...we get a scene of helen writing checks and we are provided w/the first names of many of the servants.
edelberto lizardo
bernadette burger
martha daley, no relation, i bet, to the famous fort dearborn mayor
virgil stillman
then, helen writes to walt again, her serviceman honey, stationed in the aleutians...she is also given a gift of gloves from the boxes of stuff the old maids kept...which tear along the seams as she pulls one on...80-year-old gloves...you can't take it with you and things fall apart if you leave it behind.
chap 25
sabrina...hating bernard, contempt...nice, to see the change of character...she's gone from him being her everything to the 9th circle of hell...she questions burke...interior stream of con...later, she asks her mother for her dog...to bring him there...counting mexico, it has been two months separation..
...sabrina/her mother deborah, mrs. hutchens, talk...sabrina says she got from burke "12 years of decorative nothing..." he put her through while he developed the fanciest practice in pasadena.
...sabrina is not drinking/smoking...for a month now...indication of...what? pregs? possibly
...her mother offers two letters to place in the archive...to be opened in the year 2000...like twain almost, hey?....when her mother cries, sabrina does not comfort, or console her...she no can touch her mother anymore than burke touches her.
...she writes a telegram to burke...she has hopes (about burke) secret fears...her telegram says nothing more than 'send fat boy'
chap 26
helen...reads in the paper that 380 acres near woodside...deborah hutchens's property...will be developed...117 luxury homes, 4 developers, chester webber of webber enterprises and oliver among them...homes at $60,000 to $110,000...big bucks in 1961
helen/oliver discuss this...oliver wants to see deborah's checkbook...looks himself, wants the 3g back
chap 27
sabrina...letter from burke...will be filing for a reno divorce...will send fat boy
oliver/sabrina talk of mother and land
chap 28
helen, leaving deb's room...helen/sabrina talk...sabrina/deborah...sabrina to barbara's
chap 29
sabrina considers an abortionist...sabrina/oliver...long talk...100 acres for a park she gets, plus 20 acres for mother...sabrina/helen...helen is forced to keep the 3 grand check...will be gone shortly per oliver's demands.
chap 30
barbara/sabrina...sabrina is pregnant...& drinking...sabrina talks of money, necessity..having money makes you too free...weirdness, talks of ghouls, that killer from wisconsin who hung women by their heels...eating children, speaks of a cat she saw, eating its young...barbara labor...baby on way
chap 31
oliver stream-con...male baby...then leonard/sabrina...sabrina almost gets nakkid before oliver...oops.
chap 32
May 10, 2022
“Poor Sabrina,” Leonard MacDonald muses towards the end of A Shooting Star, “still up, debating her dilemmas, beating her breast, plucking her crazy flower petals eenie meenie minie moe; still running around like a child in a snowstorm grabbing for flakes and crying when they melted in her hands. And blaming herself furiously all the time and doing her best to live up to her own bad opinion of herself” (379).
That, in a nutshell, is Sabrina Castro: a woman who seemingly has everything but is thoroughly self-destructive. It’s a testament to Wallace Stegner’s immense skill as a writer that he is able to spin a 400-page narrative about this woman’s internal turmoil without losing pace or urgency.
There are mere weeks (days?) between Sabrina’s rushing out of her own home after she confesses an affair to her husband (the scene with which the book opens) and the end of the book. In terms of events, few things happen. Internally, though, Sabrina cycles through a range of emotions — over and over again.
Wallace Stegner is one of my very favourite authors, and with this book he has proven once again why. Not only does he have an incomparable writing style, he also manages to capture the complexity of human beings and their emotional lives with such intense realism it’s like you’re literally transposed into another person’s mind for as long as the novel lasts.
Sabrina is not necessarily a likeable character, but she is very real. You can see, perfectly, why she is the way she is, and why she has such trouble breaking out of that miserable cycle. You want to shout at her to get a hold of herself, to do something, as Leonard tells her, and yet it’s clear why she can’t. I love it. I love it.
In the first half of the book, there is a lot of scene-setting. This includes a few perspective switches towards Helen Kretchmer and Sabrina’s mother (Mrs. Hutchens) that were not entirely necessary, in my opinion, because they slowed down the story a bit. They did, however, shed more light on the interactions between Sabrina and those two women, so they did deepen the story.
Nonetheless, my favorite scenes were all in the second half of the book:
- Leonard making breakfast for his daughters
- The stargazing scene in Bobbie and Leonard’s backyard
- The preamble to the climax, when Leonard comes home and finds Sabrina still there
- The climax itself
All those scenes were as vivid and brilliant as if I were watching a movie. Not that “movie-like” is the highest praise I could give a novel — definitely not. But I do so appreciate lively, dazzling imagery coupled with emotional realism. And Stegner manages all of that, all the time.
While Sabrina is the main character, I have such affection for Leonard as well. I felt strongly that he was a kind of alter ego for Stegner himself, in some ways, and I loved feeling as if I was getting to know him (Stegner) better.
So, to honor both Stegner and this book as a whole, let me close with my very favorite passage:
“I read books,” he said, “I listen to music. I have some friends. I find out something new every now and then.”
“I do you the honor of respecting your brains. I think you could do something, if you try.”
He almost laughed, the phrase was so exactly what he might have said about her, but he had not lost his irritation at being attacked senselessly at the crack of dawn. ‘What’ll you have?” he said. “Poetry? Music? Architecture? Is that it, art? I’ll tell you a secret. You need a talent and a conviction, you make art out of what is a gift or a curse, or both. I do what I can do. I try to help keep the world half-way liveable. If science was my racket I’d be red-hot to retrace the moon or find some smaller particular or a deeper sea bottom, and then you’d say I was doing something, probably. But literature’s my racket — the tradition, human wisdom, all that. These days my job is nearly all conservative. I want to keep reminding myself and my captive audience what it means to be human” (384).
Thank you, Wallace Stegner, for always showing me just that.
That, in a nutshell, is Sabrina Castro: a woman who seemingly has everything but is thoroughly self-destructive. It’s a testament to Wallace Stegner’s immense skill as a writer that he is able to spin a 400-page narrative about this woman’s internal turmoil without losing pace or urgency.
There are mere weeks (days?) between Sabrina’s rushing out of her own home after she confesses an affair to her husband (the scene with which the book opens) and the end of the book. In terms of events, few things happen. Internally, though, Sabrina cycles through a range of emotions — over and over again.
Wallace Stegner is one of my very favourite authors, and with this book he has proven once again why. Not only does he have an incomparable writing style, he also manages to capture the complexity of human beings and their emotional lives with such intense realism it’s like you’re literally transposed into another person’s mind for as long as the novel lasts.
Sabrina is not necessarily a likeable character, but she is very real. You can see, perfectly, why she is the way she is, and why she has such trouble breaking out of that miserable cycle. You want to shout at her to get a hold of herself, to do something, as Leonard tells her, and yet it’s clear why she can’t. I love it. I love it.
In the first half of the book, there is a lot of scene-setting. This includes a few perspective switches towards Helen Kretchmer and Sabrina’s mother (Mrs. Hutchens) that were not entirely necessary, in my opinion, because they slowed down the story a bit. They did, however, shed more light on the interactions between Sabrina and those two women, so they did deepen the story.
Nonetheless, my favorite scenes were all in the second half of the book:
- Leonard making breakfast for his daughters
- The stargazing scene in Bobbie and Leonard’s backyard
- The preamble to the climax, when Leonard comes home and finds Sabrina still there
- The climax itself
All those scenes were as vivid and brilliant as if I were watching a movie. Not that “movie-like” is the highest praise I could give a novel — definitely not. But I do so appreciate lively, dazzling imagery coupled with emotional realism. And Stegner manages all of that, all the time.
While Sabrina is the main character, I have such affection for Leonard as well. I felt strongly that he was a kind of alter ego for Stegner himself, in some ways, and I loved feeling as if I was getting to know him (Stegner) better.
So, to honor both Stegner and this book as a whole, let me close with my very favorite passage:
“I read books,” he said, “I listen to music. I have some friends. I find out something new every now and then.”
“I do you the honor of respecting your brains. I think you could do something, if you try.”
He almost laughed, the phrase was so exactly what he might have said about her, but he had not lost his irritation at being attacked senselessly at the crack of dawn. ‘What’ll you have?” he said. “Poetry? Music? Architecture? Is that it, art? I’ll tell you a secret. You need a talent and a conviction, you make art out of what is a gift or a curse, or both. I do what I can do. I try to help keep the world half-way liveable. If science was my racket I’d be red-hot to retrace the moon or find some smaller particular or a deeper sea bottom, and then you’d say I was doing something, probably. But literature’s my racket — the tradition, human wisdom, all that. These days my job is nearly all conservative. I want to keep reminding myself and my captive audience what it means to be human” (384).
Thank you, Wallace Stegner, for always showing me just that.
July 1, 2024
I found this gem in a used book store in Moab, Utah called Back of Beyond Books. I was patiently waiting on 4 new tires to get me home to Martinsburg, WV and was happy to find this store to meander through & take my woes off my mind. I haven’t been reading much lately because I’ve been on a road trip visiting the National Parks. I grabbed this book & sat in Moab’s town park & read for a couple hours. Hot but very peaceful. Also found a food truck park, ate pizza & read some more. That has nothing to do with this book except for the fact that I wanted to document that information. Now for the book- The main character, Sabrina is a head case. She does some stupid things, the most shameful, trying to seduce her best friend’s husband. Thankfully, he wasn’t falling for that shitz. I disliked Sabrina’s brother & mother even more than her. Although her mother is only 70 & they portray her as some old, wealthy woman. I mean she’s able to play a few rounds of golf most days so how old can she be?? Yes, I’m 70 so it hurt my feelings. 🤨 In some ways I feel sorry for Sabrina. Her husband is a cold fish & pays little attention to her, concentrating on his medical practice. They have no children only a dog named Fat Boy. Sabrina goes looking for attention & finds herself pregnant & back at Mama’s mansion with servants including a Filipino butler who slips her cocktails. The brother, Oliver is trying to make them richer by selling land & Sabrina wanted the land to be donated as a park. So see, she ain’t too bad. The novel ends with Sabrina pregnant & deciding to keep the child. No histrionics mentioned with the mother & brother being told. I do like Wallace Stegner!
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