Three Short Novels: The Son, The Lights of Earth, and The Conference of Victims

by Gina Berriault

Gina Berriault’s work as a storywriter of great psychological empathy and extraordinary elegance and subtlety was celebrated widely at the end of her life. Her collection Women in Their Beds , won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the National Books Critics Prize in fiction and the Rea Prize for lifetime achievement. She has few equals in the history of the American short story. Over the course of her career she also wrote several novels and novellas, and we have here a collection of the three finest, which have each been published before as separate volumes but which have been out of print and unavailable for many years. They each can be counted among her finest work.

The Son was first published in 1962, The Conference of Victims in 1966. And The Lights of Earth , first published in 1984, stands easily alongside her greatest achievements. All three are stories about women. In The Son , Vivian believes men run the world and finds meaning only in erotic love. As she envies her son’s future, and wishing to share it, she seduces him. Naomi, in Conference of Victims , is thrown nearly out of her mind by her brother’s suicide. Only her need to love keeps her alive. When it was first published, Andre Dubus said of The Lights of Earth , “Like her stories, it’s masterly. Its central character is a woman, Ilona Lewis, who confronts loss of earthly love. But Ilona’s experience is far more complex than losing a man because he has become a celebrity. It involves the hearts of all of us seeking the lights of earth, the soul’s blessing in its long, dark night.”

Genres: Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2014

About the author

Berriault was born in Long Beach, California, to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. Her father was a freelance writer and Berriault took her inspiration from him, using his stand-up typewriter to write her first stories while still in grammar school.

Berriault had a prolific writing career, which included stories, novels and screenplays. Her writing tended to focus on life in and around San Francisco. She published four novels and three collections of short stories, including Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories (1996), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 1997 Berriault was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre.

Berriault taught writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and San Francisco State University. She also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the Pushcart Prize and several O'Henry prizes.

She adapted her short story "The Stone Boy" for a film of the same title, released in 1984.[2] The same story had previously been adapted by another writer for a 1960 television presentation.[

Reviews

[Abby Howell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing throughout and there are moments in the Lights of Earth and The Conference of Victims that I will think about for a long time. Berriault is able to delve deeply in the minds of psyches of troubled people with originality and tenderness. The Son, written in the 60's, translates less well to our times, and I wouldn't recommend reading it. 4 stars for the other two short novels.

[Lori Bamber · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing and thinking in this book is exquisite - the subject matter is at times so dark and bleak that I wish I could remove it from my brain now that I've finished it.