Mainland

by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

A successful woman in her early forties, Eleanor feels curiously distanced from her beloved husband and children, enthralled by the odd tyranny of her family past, and at the nadir of her self-esteem when she innocently enters into adultery.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer was an American novelist and poet who was a Professor of English at Brooklyn College for more than thirty years. She won numerous national writing awards and contributed book reviews for the New York Times.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fr...

Reviews

[Marcia]

There are three things to know about renowned author, Eleanor:
- She talks to her dead mother and grandmother, or rather, listens while they harangue her (others chime in later);
- She is having surgery on her eyes after going almost blind due to a doctor's mistake;
- She had an affair

At the start of the book, before Eleanor's corrective eye surgery, her [dead] grandmother repeatedly lectures her about making her bed instead of fumbling around in the clutter of her room "I'll listen when the bed is made ... Not before. Nothing can be more important. Look at that mess! What an example you're setting for your children." ( p14). At first I thought it was a case of the old-school insistence on order and doing what's 'proper', but in retrospect I believe it's more to do with the idiom "make your bed and lie in it" and it's reference to actions and consequences.

Though one of her published articles, The Lie of Adulthood is about more than "adults are nothing more than collections of artifacts and circumstances, perspectives and contexts" (p57), it does hint to the rest of the novel. As well as hearing her dead mother and grandmother, Eleanor makes contact with people from her past, revisiting the 'artifacts and circumstances' of her own life. My question is, was it the [temporary] loss of sight that set her adrift and search for a point of contact with herself, or was it having an affair that did it?

Essentially, Mainland describes a woman in the throes of a midlife crisis. Ultimately she finds out that life is unavoidable "Some things are inevitable, like death and relatives." (p276)

[Kathi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I give up. By chapter seven, I couldn't make myself like or care about the characters and there was no action. Chapters Four and Five were okay, but then it fizzled.