Crossroads

by Mary Morris

Mary Morris's first book, the short story collection "Vanishing Animals, " was widely nailed by critics as one of the most distinguished recent debuts by a fiction writer. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters recognized her achievement with a citation and the coveted Rome Prize in Literature. Here, in her first novel, Mary Morris continues to fulfill her great promise, giving to her readers a compassionate story of good romance and bad timing, a novel of ordinary circumstance gone awry told with an extraordinary talent that is right on target.
Deborah Mills is an urban planner: an expert in traffic, a specialist in roads. At work she can plan for millions of people, but her own life seems to be a muddle. Her seven-year marriage falls apart when her husband tells her he is having an affair with one of her oldest friends. Stunned and angry, she haltingly begins her funny, bittersweet attempt to put her wrecked marriage behind her and start life anew. When her brother Zap, the family renegade, motorcycles back into her life, his reappearance causes Deborah to see how the residue of the past leaves its indelible mark on present events. Inevitably, she must set a new course: enter into new involvements and arrive at a new and encompassing autonomy. At a friend's country house she meets Sean, an assistant film director who looks strikingly like Robert De Niro. He advances, she retreats, and the questions begin. What direction should her future take? Is it too early or too late to begin all over again?
"Crossroads" is a novel about how one woman goes from being tossed about by fate to taking command of her own life. Joyce Carol Oates has praised Mary Morris's fiction as "beautifully crafted." Rosellen Brown has found her work "full of unexpected invention and sudden, almost offhand plunges toward a mysterious center." With "Crossroads," Mary Morris gives her admirers a new chance to celebrate.

ebook

First published February 1, 1983

About the author

I was born in Chicago and, though I have lived in New York for many years, my roots are still in the Midwest and many of my stories are set there. As a writer my closest influences are Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I travel as much as I can and travel fuels everything I do. When I travel, I keep extensive journals which are handwritten and include watercolors, collage as well as text. All my writing begins in these journals. I tend to move between fiction and nonfiction. I spent seventeen years working on my last novel, The Jazz Palace. I think I learned a lot writing that book because the next one only took three years., Gateway to the Moon. Gateway which will be out in March 2018 is historical fiction about the secret Jews of New Mexico. I am also working on my fifth travel memoir about my travels alone. This one is about looking for tigers.

Reviews

[Cherise Wolas]

Review to come.