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Le figlie degli altri
Un professore di Harvard si innamora di una studentessa, e abbandona per lei la rassicurante monotonia di una vita già tracciata. Ma il mare aperto del nuovo amore lo porta a sperimentare, con l'ebbrezza della felicità, una inattesa nostalgia, un cocente senso di perdita. Ritratto appuntito di un uomo e del suo mondo (quello sofisticato, ironico, cerebrale degli intellettuali di Harvard), "Le figlie degli altri" riporta in scena l'America ancora puritana degli anni '70. E ne disegna un ritratto che guadagnò a Stern l'ammirazione di Saul Bellow e di Philip Roth. Introduzione di Philip Roth.
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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September 22, 2019
”’Will you let me say something, though? About young girls?’
‘A warning?’
‘In a way. I know the danger of classifying human beings, but I’ve known a lot of these girls. The last few years I’ve felt a terrific drive in them. They want, they want, and it’s a we not-quite-greybeards who give them the most the quickest. We teach them, we spend on them, we show them off, we tell then what everything means. We’re their Graduate School. Which means they’re closer to graduation through us. And that means there can be lots of tears when Graduation Day rolls around.’”
I’ve been in many discussions about the attractions that some young women have for older men and the desires that older men have for younger women. Most people seem to feel that the man, based on the fact that he is older and should know better, should be the one to resist the temptation. Like many men caught up in a lustful affair, Dr. Robert Merriwether has a wife and family. People might think that, if he loved his children, he should have been able to keep from falling under the spell of the beautiful Cynthia Ryder. Do you like that? Cyn...Sin.
The thought has never really crossed Merriwether to have an affair. When Cynthia comes to him as a patient requesting The Pill, he still doesn’t see her as anything other than a speculative figure, relating to her request. You will see that she is the one to make sure that she puts herself continually in his path, like a lovely flower.
So should we see Merriwether as an awful, lecherous man, taking advantage of the naive, young girl? It is hard to see him that way. I tend to see these situations as more of a mutually beneficial arrangement, where she gets the benefits of his wisdom, enhanced economic situation, and a more attentive male than men her own age. He benefits from, hopefully, feeling younger (though sometimes the man starts to feel old when she has never heard of The X-Files or The Beatles.), feeling more relevant with a pretty young woman on his arm, and having as much sex as he can handle.
Merriwether is further hamstrung by the fact that his wife, Sarah, has not had sex with him in years. ”Sarah was the sahara.” As the reader, I am somewhat mystified by her hostility towards him. He tries to explain: ”She had a nose for tyranny. She detested authority. She’d never been able to work under anyone.” This rings true for me because I’ve known someone who reacts the same way to any situation where she would have to defer to someone else, but we don’t really learn Sarah’s views until later in the novel, until after the marriage is lost. She does admit at one point, in a note, that maybe she should have better articulated her dissatisfaction.
In many ways, it seems to me, as I pull together the pieces regarding the shambles of this marriage from what Robert and Sarah would let known, that she certainly feels trapped and blames everything wrong with her life on her husband. Never a good position to be in for the wife, and certainly an untenable situation for the husband.
The book was published in 1973, but is set in the late 1960s. Women are just beginning to feel empowered to escape their claustrophobia lives. Sarah may not have known what to do, but she knows she needs something more or maybe something less, in the form of a husband, in her life.
My fear, of course, because I had become fond of Merriwether, is that this is a passing phase for him. That his attraction to Cynthia is only skin deep, and that he is blowing up his, though terrible, marriage for a lustful folly, but then he says this to a friend, ”I feel about her the way Galileo did about the telescope. My feelings for her enlarge my feelings for other things.” Not that the whole affair couldn’t collapse in a moment if Cynthia decides that the pressure of the situation is too much or finds herself fancying someone else.
All the push and pull and paranoia and uncertainty is also part of the invigorating elements of launching a new relationship.
Merriwether feels guilt regarding his kids and even some guilt regarding Sarah. ”The night noise of the house was precious now, the stirrings below, the children’s breath which collected in the halls and made the atmosphere of his home. He was there, if something happened, fire, burglary, sickness, he was there to help. His own breath met his children’s.”
For the first time in their lives, he is not going to be there. They will not be under his protective wing. The worst thing any father or husband can contemplate is that his family is in peril, and he is not there. Merriwether will not be there, but in the bed of his Lolita.
This is, without a doubt, the most honest book I’ve read about divorce. I think that Richard Stern manages to tell everyone’s side of the story as clearly as possible. Our tendency is to want to salvage marriages, but really a Merriwether divorce, even before Robert met Cynthia, is probably inevitable. The Merriwether’s have gone too long without talking. The kids have come along, and whatever issues they might have are tucked beneath the rug for the sake of the children. By the time we meet them, that rug has become lumpy and, frankly, has become a hazard to traverse.
We are reassured when we understand why marriages collapse. When finances or the loss of child or infidelity are the main culprit, we breathe a sigh of relief. Those reasons we can understand. Infidelity may have ended Robert and Sarah’s marriage, but it was dead long before that happened. I think that we sometimes quit really seeing one another and forget what we liked about each other. Children or work or just the crippling burden of life can sometimes distort us into people we don’t even recognize. We forget that our wife is still a hot tamale or that our husband is still a handsome devil. Or maybe the witty wife becomes cynical and snide, or the charming husband becomes imperial and grumpy. Sex becomes perfunctory and only a shadow of the sultry, sweaty encounters of the past.
It is really amazing how much can be worked out over a bottle of wine, just talking, just really seeing each other, just giving yourself a chance to reconnect with the person you want to be and hopefully finding your way to that person with the help of your spouse. Sometimes, we have to work together to find the people we fell in love with.
I could see that Sarah and Robert are both having dawning realizations about their marriage, but the barrelling train of our legal system was already disappearing around the bend. Not enough talking, not enough explaining, not enough listening, not enough empathy, not enough remembering.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
‘A warning?’
‘In a way. I know the danger of classifying human beings, but I’ve known a lot of these girls. The last few years I’ve felt a terrific drive in them. They want, they want, and it’s a we not-quite-greybeards who give them the most the quickest. We teach them, we spend on them, we show them off, we tell then what everything means. We’re their Graduate School. Which means they’re closer to graduation through us. And that means there can be lots of tears when Graduation Day rolls around.’”
I’ve been in many discussions about the attractions that some young women have for older men and the desires that older men have for younger women. Most people seem to feel that the man, based on the fact that he is older and should know better, should be the one to resist the temptation. Like many men caught up in a lustful affair, Dr. Robert Merriwether has a wife and family. People might think that, if he loved his children, he should have been able to keep from falling under the spell of the beautiful Cynthia Ryder. Do you like that? Cyn...Sin.
The thought has never really crossed Merriwether to have an affair. When Cynthia comes to him as a patient requesting The Pill, he still doesn’t see her as anything other than a speculative figure, relating to her request. You will see that she is the one to make sure that she puts herself continually in his path, like a lovely flower.
So should we see Merriwether as an awful, lecherous man, taking advantage of the naive, young girl? It is hard to see him that way. I tend to see these situations as more of a mutually beneficial arrangement, where she gets the benefits of his wisdom, enhanced economic situation, and a more attentive male than men her own age. He benefits from, hopefully, feeling younger (though sometimes the man starts to feel old when she has never heard of The X-Files or The Beatles.), feeling more relevant with a pretty young woman on his arm, and having as much sex as he can handle.
Merriwether is further hamstrung by the fact that his wife, Sarah, has not had sex with him in years. ”Sarah was the sahara.” As the reader, I am somewhat mystified by her hostility towards him. He tries to explain: ”She had a nose for tyranny. She detested authority. She’d never been able to work under anyone.” This rings true for me because I’ve known someone who reacts the same way to any situation where she would have to defer to someone else, but we don’t really learn Sarah’s views until later in the novel, until after the marriage is lost. She does admit at one point, in a note, that maybe she should have better articulated her dissatisfaction.
In many ways, it seems to me, as I pull together the pieces regarding the shambles of this marriage from what Robert and Sarah would let known, that she certainly feels trapped and blames everything wrong with her life on her husband. Never a good position to be in for the wife, and certainly an untenable situation for the husband.
The book was published in 1973, but is set in the late 1960s. Women are just beginning to feel empowered to escape their claustrophobia lives. Sarah may not have known what to do, but she knows she needs something more or maybe something less, in the form of a husband, in her life.
My fear, of course, because I had become fond of Merriwether, is that this is a passing phase for him. That his attraction to Cynthia is only skin deep, and that he is blowing up his, though terrible, marriage for a lustful folly, but then he says this to a friend, ”I feel about her the way Galileo did about the telescope. My feelings for her enlarge my feelings for other things.” Not that the whole affair couldn’t collapse in a moment if Cynthia decides that the pressure of the situation is too much or finds herself fancying someone else.
All the push and pull and paranoia and uncertainty is also part of the invigorating elements of launching a new relationship.
Merriwether feels guilt regarding his kids and even some guilt regarding Sarah. ”The night noise of the house was precious now, the stirrings below, the children’s breath which collected in the halls and made the atmosphere of his home. He was there, if something happened, fire, burglary, sickness, he was there to help. His own breath met his children’s.”
For the first time in their lives, he is not going to be there. They will not be under his protective wing. The worst thing any father or husband can contemplate is that his family is in peril, and he is not there. Merriwether will not be there, but in the bed of his Lolita.
This is, without a doubt, the most honest book I’ve read about divorce. I think that Richard Stern manages to tell everyone’s side of the story as clearly as possible. Our tendency is to want to salvage marriages, but really a Merriwether divorce, even before Robert met Cynthia, is probably inevitable. The Merriwether’s have gone too long without talking. The kids have come along, and whatever issues they might have are tucked beneath the rug for the sake of the children. By the time we meet them, that rug has become lumpy and, frankly, has become a hazard to traverse.
We are reassured when we understand why marriages collapse. When finances or the loss of child or infidelity are the main culprit, we breathe a sigh of relief. Those reasons we can understand. Infidelity may have ended Robert and Sarah’s marriage, but it was dead long before that happened. I think that we sometimes quit really seeing one another and forget what we liked about each other. Children or work or just the crippling burden of life can sometimes distort us into people we don’t even recognize. We forget that our wife is still a hot tamale or that our husband is still a handsome devil. Or maybe the witty wife becomes cynical and snide, or the charming husband becomes imperial and grumpy. Sex becomes perfunctory and only a shadow of the sultry, sweaty encounters of the past.
It is really amazing how much can be worked out over a bottle of wine, just talking, just really seeing each other, just giving yourself a chance to reconnect with the person you want to be and hopefully finding your way to that person with the help of your spouse. Sometimes, we have to work together to find the people we fell in love with.
I could see that Sarah and Robert are both having dawning realizations about their marriage, but the barrelling train of our legal system was already disappearing around the bend. Not enough talking, not enough explaining, not enough listening, not enough empathy, not enough remembering.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
January 24, 2025
"Miss Ryder was golden-haired but almost Indian dark, slimly full, tall, slightly prognathous, brown-eyed. Her hair waterfalled to the top thoracic vertebra, her tanned flesh issued from a laundered yellow corolla. A human sunflower." - Richard Stern, Other Men's Daughters
Other Men’s Daughters - American author Richard Stern’s 1973 novel of forty-year-old family man and Harvard professor Robert Merriweather’s transformation brought about by his relationship with a twenty-year-old beauty by the name of Cynthia Ryder. For instance, here's the author’s description of Merriweather’s wife catching a whiff of the change: “For months now, Sarah specialized in her husband’s moves. She classified his gestures, checked his bills, noted his new suit, his brighter ties, the extra shag in his hair. He spent more time in the lab than he had for fifteen years. There is a new ease in his speech and dress, yet he has long since stopped asking her what she had even longer refused him.”
In a way, this is a timeless tale of modern life: older university professor stuck in a stale marriage discovers new dimensions of love and intimacy with bright, vivacious younger woman. Robert Merriweather shares a good deal in common with another professor from a much beloved classic: William Stoner in John Williams’ Stoner, a novel set at the University of Missouri in the early 1930s. And, of course, the respective dramas of William Stoner and Robert Merriweather have been repeated scores of times across college campuses ever since.
In yet another sense Richard Stern’s novel captures the unique social and cultural shift that occurred in the United States in the 1960s. So much so, Philip Roth notes in his Introduction to this New York Review Books edition: “Other Men’s Daughters illuminates a decisive turning point in American mores. The novel reminds us of where we were, morally speaking, when the vast assault upon convention, propriety, and entrenched belief began to challenge authority, high and low, and of the wreckage that caused, the theatrics it fostered, the hope and euphoria and intemperance it quickened.”
In Saul Bellow’s Herzog, the entire novel is told wholly from main character Herzog’s point of view - his memories, his thoughts, his perceptions, the letters he writes. Very different from Richard Stern’s third person narrator, where unfolding events are reported a great deal more objectively and occasionally shift from Robert Merriweather to focus on the reflections and feelings of others: Cynthia Ryder, Merriweather’s wife Sarah, a former Harvard colleague, Cynthia’s father who happens to be a wealthy lawyer from North Carolina. All with great precision and economy.
To share a small sample, here is Sarah, irate and furious, fuming over her role as Robert’s short, chubby, unattractive, stay-at-home wife: “He would be off, the secret prowler. While she kept the home fires burning. And he blamed her. As if her body could be purchased by three daily meals, and this leaky hutch which she alone kept up. (He couldn’t hammer a nail.) As if he really cared to make love to her. Frigid? No, no more than any woman with a husband who saw her as an interior broom.” Is it any wonder literary critic Anatole Broyard reviewing the novel for the New York Times said Sarah loves her hatred with a sexual intensity?
And in case anybody is wondering about Cynthia Ryder being the young innocent seduced by a smooth talking older man, here is the North Carolina lovely on her teenage love life prior to meeting Merriweather: “Boys were there to be used, to be loved, to be lost in, to be surmounted. Virginity was the first obstacle. Between that and marriage was the Era of Exploration: boys-men were to be explored, tested. For Cynthia, the spring of Sixty-Nine had been a sexual pageant. Behind Jamie’s back (her steady boyfriend at the time), she’d slept at least once with eight boys.”
As readers we share the various (and somewhat predictable) scenes of Robert Merriweather going through the travails of his divorce – the showdown with Sarah, the distasteful meeting with Sarah’s lawyer, picking over the details of the divorce settlement, the last family Thanksgiving and Christmas with Sarah and their two sons and two daughters in the New England house that has been in Merriweather’s family for generations. Richard Stern's writing brings out the touching humanness without sliding into emotions overly sentimental or cloying.
Such a penetrating, well-written novel, thus I will conclude with a quote from one of America’s foremost literary masters, Thomas Berger: “For years I have admired the elegant fiction of Richard Stern for its impeccable language, its gracious erudition, and, above all, it’s brilliant wit. In Other Men’s Daughters, to me his most moving novel, these qualities serve the cause of mercy.”
American author Richard Stern (1928-2013)
August 2, 2021
I don't think I've been this upset by a novel since Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which is ironic, as Richard Stern, the author of this novel, was Roth's friend and colleague of 57 years, before Stern died in 2013.
But. . . I don't want to give you the impression that Stern writes like Roth. He doesn't. At all. His writing reminds me far more, in fact, of two British writers from the previous generation: J.L. Carr and Barbara Comyns. I don't know if Stern was influenced by either of these writers, but I felt traces of both of their styles in his.
The part that reminds me of Roth's Pastoral is. . . the pain in the intestines. The gut-wrenching pain of a ridiculously honest representation of life and marriage. Not marriage in those first couple of decades, either, y'all. Nah. The real arrow to the heart comes from looking at a marriage at the 20+ year mark, and married with multiple kids.
Elizabeth Strout has a break-your-heart examination of a mutually agreed upon asexual marriage in her short story “Windmills,” and that amazing story comforts me in its depiction of how even unusual things can work in a marriage, as long as they work for both parties.
But Stern's novel, the horribly misnamed Other Men's Daughters, examines something very different: what happens when a couple is mismatched, but bonded by children and shared family history, and one spouse wants desperately to maintain intimacy while the other has retreated to an asexual existence.
Sigh.
It's a long life, people, filled with twists and turns, and what the heart wants in the early 20s ain't always what the heart wants. . . a couple of decades and several children later.
This is a story that takes the reader through the dissolution of a marriage, and it isn't pretty. I couldn't read more than 10 pages at a time; I recoiled so painfully through the protagonist's grief of losing his family's way of life, his childhood home and his secure, daily routine:
It had been snowing since noon, densely; the streets were Siberian. George wanted a snowball fight. Muffled and booted, everyone but Sarah went out. Four o'clock, the light off the snow was the strange, sad, half-bright light of snow-days.
While the others cossacked up and down, packing, hurling, chasing, Merriwether looked from the steps. Receding into the triangle, they looked like silhouettes, their voices bodied in the cartoon balloons of their breath. The street lights went on in the iron lamps. Bluish fluorescents under iron caps. “I love you, Acorn Street,” said Merriwether.
There's not a lot of winning here. Everyone, for most of the novel, is on a losing team. . . but, at the novel's end, when the young son, George, catches a fish and explains to his father that the fish was so easy to catch, “maybe it didn't want to live,” the fish surprises both father and son by suddenly “hopping around the hook, panting, gills flapping.”
Turns out, the fish doesn't want to be complacent, swimming around in the same damn pond, just waiting to die.
No, the fish wants to live.
But. . . I don't want to give you the impression that Stern writes like Roth. He doesn't. At all. His writing reminds me far more, in fact, of two British writers from the previous generation: J.L. Carr and Barbara Comyns. I don't know if Stern was influenced by either of these writers, but I felt traces of both of their styles in his.
The part that reminds me of Roth's Pastoral is. . . the pain in the intestines. The gut-wrenching pain of a ridiculously honest representation of life and marriage. Not marriage in those first couple of decades, either, y'all. Nah. The real arrow to the heart comes from looking at a marriage at the 20+ year mark, and married with multiple kids.
Elizabeth Strout has a break-your-heart examination of a mutually agreed upon asexual marriage in her short story “Windmills,” and that amazing story comforts me in its depiction of how even unusual things can work in a marriage, as long as they work for both parties.
But Stern's novel, the horribly misnamed Other Men's Daughters, examines something very different: what happens when a couple is mismatched, but bonded by children and shared family history, and one spouse wants desperately to maintain intimacy while the other has retreated to an asexual existence.
Sigh.
It's a long life, people, filled with twists and turns, and what the heart wants in the early 20s ain't always what the heart wants. . . a couple of decades and several children later.
This is a story that takes the reader through the dissolution of a marriage, and it isn't pretty. I couldn't read more than 10 pages at a time; I recoiled so painfully through the protagonist's grief of losing his family's way of life, his childhood home and his secure, daily routine:
It had been snowing since noon, densely; the streets were Siberian. George wanted a snowball fight. Muffled and booted, everyone but Sarah went out. Four o'clock, the light off the snow was the strange, sad, half-bright light of snow-days.
While the others cossacked up and down, packing, hurling, chasing, Merriwether looked from the steps. Receding into the triangle, they looked like silhouettes, their voices bodied in the cartoon balloons of their breath. The street lights went on in the iron lamps. Bluish fluorescents under iron caps. “I love you, Acorn Street,” said Merriwether.
There's not a lot of winning here. Everyone, for most of the novel, is on a losing team. . . but, at the novel's end, when the young son, George, catches a fish and explains to his father that the fish was so easy to catch, “maybe it didn't want to live,” the fish surprises both father and son by suddenly “hopping around the hook, panting, gills flapping.”
Turns out, the fish doesn't want to be complacent, swimming around in the same damn pond, just waiting to die.
No, the fish wants to live.
April 23, 2019
I wanted to slap the protagonist a dozen times.
Pretty early on my thought of him was
“ you’re such an asshole”...
I especially felt disgust for Merriweather when he had a young student in his daughters bedroom...
where he found the record player he was looking for.
A summer student at Harvard, Cynthia Ryder brought over a record that she wanted Dr.Merriweather to hear. (and seduce him with)
Cynthia had no business being in the doctors house...let alone his daughters bedroom.
It got worse when Cynthia took off her shoes and put on his daughters moccasins.
Cynthia was going through his daughters things.
After Merriweather caught her, she said...
“Oh please forgive me. I’m so awful. I just— I want to know everything about you. Please forgive me”.
WE CAN SLAP Cynthia, now, too!!!
I hate women like Cynthia that go after married men.
Regardless of what Mr. Slimy does..where was her pride? The guy not only had a wife but 4 kids: Albie,
Prisella, Esmeralda, and George.
We get information stories about the wife and kids too
Merriweather’s response to Cynthia after she apologized going through his daughter’s things made me want to kick Merriweather in the balls.
“Nothing to forgive”.
See? He’s a *total* asshole!!!
“Stay out of your daughters room, Mr. Shithead!!!
Take your sleazy affair someplace else Mr.”, I say!!!
I was definitely reading every page of this book but I was swearing back at the characters many times.
*Finally*, Merriweather tells Cynthia- ( 20 years younger- for which we are not surprised)....
“ I think it’s gone as far as it will go”.
Should we believe him??
Absolutely not!!
Merriweather’s moral thought of consciousness lasted for less than an hour.
I started to hate this book-
but kept reading.
The rats in Merriweather’s science lab were being neglected while he was being the biggest rat 🐀 of all.
When Cynthia was found naked in Merriweather’s daughter bed......‘pleading’ for Merriweather to lie down on his daughters bed with her..... of course he did as he was told!
And then...
we hear Dr. Merriweather’s inner thoughts...
“There’s a deja vu, a deja vu lu about this. It’s so...
typical: The good old innocent prof who’s never even called an undergraduate by his Christian name. And the undergraduate taking him by the hand, leading him where she thinks she knows he wants to go”.
Merriweather was a dirty scumbag! Period!!!
Yep... I kinda hated this book!!!
Yet it was very well written...
I admit to being fully engaged.
Our Internet has been down in our house for quite a while - so I really can’t be online in very long.
I can’t even listen to an Audiobook while I’m cutting veggies - mixing with pasta for dinner tonight.
Cooking in silence is a new phenomenon.
Ha... the Zen of silence returns.
Nobody has to read this book... but there are some good qualities about this academic literary snobbish novel.
It definitely held my interest... but I judged the asshole an awful lot as you can see!
Cheers & Blessings!!!!
3.5 rating. - The writing was excellent -
The character study was too -
But it’s a slimy story.
This is avant-garde literary novel is
Snobbish...
but alluring to keep reading.
Pretty early on my thought of him was
“ you’re such an asshole”...
I especially felt disgust for Merriweather when he had a young student in his daughters bedroom...
where he found the record player he was looking for.
A summer student at Harvard, Cynthia Ryder brought over a record that she wanted Dr.Merriweather to hear. (and seduce him with)
Cynthia had no business being in the doctors house...let alone his daughters bedroom.
It got worse when Cynthia took off her shoes and put on his daughters moccasins.
Cynthia was going through his daughters things.
After Merriweather caught her, she said...
“Oh please forgive me. I’m so awful. I just— I want to know everything about you. Please forgive me”.
WE CAN SLAP Cynthia, now, too!!!
I hate women like Cynthia that go after married men.
Regardless of what Mr. Slimy does..where was her pride? The guy not only had a wife but 4 kids: Albie,
Prisella, Esmeralda, and George.
We get information stories about the wife and kids too
Merriweather’s response to Cynthia after she apologized going through his daughter’s things made me want to kick Merriweather in the balls.
“Nothing to forgive”.
See? He’s a *total* asshole!!!
“Stay out of your daughters room, Mr. Shithead!!!
Take your sleazy affair someplace else Mr.”, I say!!!
I was definitely reading every page of this book but I was swearing back at the characters many times.
*Finally*, Merriweather tells Cynthia- ( 20 years younger- for which we are not surprised)....
“ I think it’s gone as far as it will go”.
Should we believe him??
Absolutely not!!
Merriweather’s moral thought of consciousness lasted for less than an hour.
I started to hate this book-
but kept reading.
The rats in Merriweather’s science lab were being neglected while he was being the biggest rat 🐀 of all.
When Cynthia was found naked in Merriweather’s daughter bed......‘pleading’ for Merriweather to lie down on his daughters bed with her..... of course he did as he was told!
And then...
we hear Dr. Merriweather’s inner thoughts...
“There’s a deja vu, a deja vu lu about this. It’s so...
typical: The good old innocent prof who’s never even called an undergraduate by his Christian name. And the undergraduate taking him by the hand, leading him where she thinks she knows he wants to go”.
Merriweather was a dirty scumbag! Period!!!
Yep... I kinda hated this book!!!
Yet it was very well written...
I admit to being fully engaged.
Our Internet has been down in our house for quite a while - so I really can’t be online in very long.
I can’t even listen to an Audiobook while I’m cutting veggies - mixing with pasta for dinner tonight.
Cooking in silence is a new phenomenon.
Ha... the Zen of silence returns.
Nobody has to read this book... but there are some good qualities about this academic literary snobbish novel.
It definitely held my interest... but I judged the asshole an awful lot as you can see!
Cheers & Blessings!!!!
3.5 rating. - The writing was excellent -
The character study was too -
But it’s a slimy story.
This is avant-garde literary novel is
Snobbish...
but alluring to keep reading.
July 7, 2019
Bien, buena lectura. Pero no ha llegado a hechizarme. Supongo que por mis altas expectativas.
March 19, 2012
Attention, Writers! Having trouble getting published? And too proud to write a vampire book?
Well, I’ve made a discovery that could help you. Write a book, any book; good or bad. But for the title, ah, here is the trick. Just combine an occupation with the word ‘daughter’. If there are any occupations left, that is.
There’s already The Apothecary’s Daughter, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Alchemist’s Daughter, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, The Bearkeeper’s Daughter, the Printmaker’s Daughter, The Goldsmith’s Daughter, The Lightkeeper’s Daughter, The Farmer’s Daughter (there’s a joke about that one too, I think), The Baker’s Daughter, The Winemaker’s Daughter, The General’s Daughter, The Florist’s Daughter and The Mortician’s Daughter.
There’s The King’s Daughter and The Queen’s Daughter but there’s also The Warlord’s Daughter and The President’s Daughter. Religions are covered: The Preacher’s Daughter, The Clergyman’s Daughter, The Minister’s Daughter, The Parson’s Daughter, the Bishop’s Daughter, The Rabbi’s Daughter, and even The Imam’s Daughter.
No profession or occupation is too obscure or unlikely: The Gravedigger’s Daughter, The Assassin’s Daughter, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Heretic’s Daughter, The Hangman’s Daughter, The Witch’s Daughter, The Wizard’s Daughter, The Mistress’ Daughter, and The Samurai’s Daughter.
There’s The Abortionist’s Daughter, which I’m guessing has some irony in it. Also available are The Musician’s Daughter, The Ringmaster’s Daughter, The Professor’s Daughter, The Merchant’s Daughter, The Pirate’s Daughter and Ronia, The Robber’s Daughter.
Although not strictly occupations, there are also The Optimist’s Daughter and even The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
Sigh.
In the middle of a rant about Publishing for Dummies, I was interrupted by a good friend who recommended Other Men’s Daughters.
This is a real book. And it's real good.
It's mis-titled though. There's only one other man's daughter involved (not plural). Cynthia Ryder is a lawyer's daughter, equal parts intelligence and eroticism. But the book is not fundamentally about her but about Robert Merriwether, a doctor and professor, lost in a decaying marriage that remains afloat only because of a shared love for his own four children.
Cynthia Ryder changes all that. Merriwether has to make some choices.
This is a topic (adultery and divorce), in a place (Cambridge) and time (the 1970s), which could make a skeptical reader wonder if the author could pull it off. There were a lot of embarrassing things in the 70s after all: polyester, huge eyeglasses and sideburns, the Stylistics, Couples. This book has aged better. It is about the depth of love after loss.
Merriwether is in an awkward spot. He is brilliant yet flawed. Courteous and analytical, his soothing conversational style helps. Cynthia Ryder is not wrong, though, when she calls him 'Creep'.
Even the briefest character is meticulously drawn. The writing has all the intelligence, if not the technicolor of Coover.
Ah, but Cynthia Ryder. Lounging in a denim shirt. Playful, disarming repartee. It is hard to believe her, and impossible to forget.
Well, I’ve made a discovery that could help you. Write a book, any book; good or bad. But for the title, ah, here is the trick. Just combine an occupation with the word ‘daughter’. If there are any occupations left, that is.
There’s already The Apothecary’s Daughter, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Alchemist’s Daughter, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, The Bearkeeper’s Daughter, the Printmaker’s Daughter, The Goldsmith’s Daughter, The Lightkeeper’s Daughter, The Farmer’s Daughter (there’s a joke about that one too, I think), The Baker’s Daughter, The Winemaker’s Daughter, The General’s Daughter, The Florist’s Daughter and The Mortician’s Daughter.
There’s The King’s Daughter and The Queen’s Daughter but there’s also The Warlord’s Daughter and The President’s Daughter. Religions are covered: The Preacher’s Daughter, The Clergyman’s Daughter, The Minister’s Daughter, The Parson’s Daughter, the Bishop’s Daughter, The Rabbi’s Daughter, and even The Imam’s Daughter.
No profession or occupation is too obscure or unlikely: The Gravedigger’s Daughter, The Assassin’s Daughter, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, The Heretic’s Daughter, The Hangman’s Daughter, The Witch’s Daughter, The Wizard’s Daughter, The Mistress’ Daughter, and The Samurai’s Daughter.
There’s The Abortionist’s Daughter, which I’m guessing has some irony in it. Also available are The Musician’s Daughter, The Ringmaster’s Daughter, The Professor’s Daughter, The Merchant’s Daughter, The Pirate’s Daughter and Ronia, The Robber’s Daughter.
Although not strictly occupations, there are also The Optimist’s Daughter and even The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
Sigh.
In the middle of a rant about Publishing for Dummies, I was interrupted by a good friend who recommended Other Men’s Daughters.
This is a real book. And it's real good.
It's mis-titled though. There's only one other man's daughter involved (not plural). Cynthia Ryder is a lawyer's daughter, equal parts intelligence and eroticism. But the book is not fundamentally about her but about Robert Merriwether, a doctor and professor, lost in a decaying marriage that remains afloat only because of a shared love for his own four children.
Cynthia Ryder changes all that. Merriwether has to make some choices.
This is a topic (adultery and divorce), in a place (Cambridge) and time (the 1970s), which could make a skeptical reader wonder if the author could pull it off. There were a lot of embarrassing things in the 70s after all: polyester, huge eyeglasses and sideburns, the Stylistics, Couples. This book has aged better. It is about the depth of love after loss.
Merriwether is in an awkward spot. He is brilliant yet flawed. Courteous and analytical, his soothing conversational style helps. Cynthia Ryder is not wrong, though, when she calls him 'Creep'.
Even the briefest character is meticulously drawn. The writing has all the intelligence, if not the technicolor of Coover.
Ah, but Cynthia Ryder. Lounging in a denim shirt. Playful, disarming repartee. It is hard to believe her, and impossible to forget.
December 28, 2017
"By the time you're my age, [love is] but a combination of lust and nostalgia."At first glance, I was feeling a bit over this book. Not another novel about a middle aged professor tiring of his life and taking up with a younger, freer woman. How many of those are there, anyway? And what would make NYRB republish this one if better known novelists have done it and kept in the spotlight?
"The last few years I've felt a terrific drive in [women.] They want, they want, and it's we not-quite-graybeards who give them the most the quickest. We teach them, we spend on them, we show them off, we tell them what everything means. We're their Graduate School."But it isn't just about that. It's about that conflict between traditional and the "new" (late 60s, early 70s), living your whole life based on external expectations even if you're miserable or daring to see what might be beyond that, and then suffering the very real consequences of breaking up a family.
"For years now, as his marriage unglued, Merriweather was conscious of the marital 'we.' He thought of it as an American shield against suspicion (of loneliness, debauchery, homosexuality, eccentricity.) 'We went,' 'We saw,' 'Josie and I,' "Jeanne and I.' Was it a proud flag of dependence or did the connubial pair exist only as a pair, as colonial animals exist only as colonies?"Even when a family is only stable on paper, that's still more stable than it becomes when it is torn apart, relocated and separated. I think Stern captures this well and doesn't pass judgement on the characters, although the men are overly (for my tastes) focused on the physical appearance of all the female characters in the novel, and often use them as reasons for doing or not doing things. I suppose this was the norm in the 70s, but it is jarring.
"I feel about her the way Galileo did about the telescope. My feelings for her enlarge my feelings for other things."In fact I'm finding I have similar feelings to my reactions to Revolutionary Road. Do I even like this book? I think it is well-written and captures a lot of complexity. But the men see the women only by what they get from them. It is decades away from partnership, that's for sure. Who wouldn't keep looking for something more?
"Maybe human beings who love each other should only present their best face to each other, saving their miseries for silence, dark and the pillow."
Thanks to the publisher for providing access to a copy before its republication date through Edelweiss, and then providing me an additional copy when my review copy would not function properly.
Published 29 August, 2017, by New York Review of Books.
December 31, 2021
“Il turbolento decennio – undici anni, per l’esattezza – iniziato col dramma dell’assassinio del presidente Kennedy, proseguito attraverso gli orrori della guerra del Vietnam, e concluso con le dimissioni del più subdolo di tutti i subdoli comandanti in capo, Richard Nixon.”
Questo è il periodo di storia americana nel quale si inserisce questo romanzo che mette in risalto il momento del cambiamento, il giro di boa che porterà la mentalità americana dal più schietto puritanesimo alla liberalizzazione dei costumi, morali e sessuali.
L’ambiente è quello universitario di Cambridge e Harvard, dove Merriwether, uno stimato professore-biologo si lascia volentieri sedurre da Cynthia, una spregiudicata studentessa della Carolina del Sud, iscritta ai corsi estivi e provvista di Pillola.
Ciò che per noi oggi è abbastanza scontato lo è decisamente meno alla fine degli anni Sessanta, quando la sola parola “divorzio” è ancora un tabù per la buona borghesia del New England.
Ma ...the times they are a-changing...La relazione, dapprima clandestina, poi scandalosamente evidente, diventa per il rispettato e rispettoso professor Merriwether “lo strappo” che lo porterà a smantellare molti aspetti della sua vita precedente, prima di tutto, naturalmente, la sua bella, colta, beneducata famiglia.
Interessante appare qui il fatto che lo scrittore assuma a tratti anche il punto di vista di Sarah, la moglie che ha sacrificato buona parte della sua intelligenza al servizio di quella del marito.
Per fortuna esiste anche una voce che esprime la sua rabbia e la sua frustrazione, altrimenti vedremmo le cose soltanto attraverso l’educata costernazione (e il sano greve egoismo) del protagonista. Proveremmo simpatia per la natura di quello strappo che non senza dolore dovrà portarlo a prendere una ovvia decisione. Per fortuna la solidarietà del lettore viene a tratti interrotta.
Interessante anche il confronto fra le due Americhe, quella più ruvida, pratica, arrampicatrice del Sud e quella intellettuale del Nord, dove il linguaggio della cultura sa ben travestire di buone maniere i cattivi sentimenti.
Gli anni Settanta sono alle porte, con il loro contenuto rivoluzionario e Stern (amato maestro di Roth, diciamolo) sa cogliere benissimo il momento cruciale e critico di questo passaggio.
Questo è il periodo di storia americana nel quale si inserisce questo romanzo che mette in risalto il momento del cambiamento, il giro di boa che porterà la mentalità americana dal più schietto puritanesimo alla liberalizzazione dei costumi, morali e sessuali.
L’ambiente è quello universitario di Cambridge e Harvard, dove Merriwether, uno stimato professore-biologo si lascia volentieri sedurre da Cynthia, una spregiudicata studentessa della Carolina del Sud, iscritta ai corsi estivi e provvista di Pillola.
Ciò che per noi oggi è abbastanza scontato lo è decisamente meno alla fine degli anni Sessanta, quando la sola parola “divorzio” è ancora un tabù per la buona borghesia del New England.
Ma ...the times they are a-changing...La relazione, dapprima clandestina, poi scandalosamente evidente, diventa per il rispettato e rispettoso professor Merriwether “lo strappo” che lo porterà a smantellare molti aspetti della sua vita precedente, prima di tutto, naturalmente, la sua bella, colta, beneducata famiglia.
Interessante appare qui il fatto che lo scrittore assuma a tratti anche il punto di vista di Sarah, la moglie che ha sacrificato buona parte della sua intelligenza al servizio di quella del marito.
Per fortuna esiste anche una voce che esprime la sua rabbia e la sua frustrazione, altrimenti vedremmo le cose soltanto attraverso l’educata costernazione (e il sano greve egoismo) del protagonista. Proveremmo simpatia per la natura di quello strappo che non senza dolore dovrà portarlo a prendere una ovvia decisione. Per fortuna la solidarietà del lettore viene a tratti interrotta.
Interessante anche il confronto fra le due Americhe, quella più ruvida, pratica, arrampicatrice del Sud e quella intellettuale del Nord, dove il linguaggio della cultura sa ben travestire di buone maniere i cattivi sentimenti.
Gli anni Settanta sono alle porte, con il loro contenuto rivoluzionario e Stern (amato maestro di Roth, diciamolo) sa cogliere benissimo il momento cruciale e critico di questo passaggio.
October 15, 2019
Il professore di desiderio
Di Richard Stern si dice che, nel doppio ruolo di amico e mentore, fu l’uomo che convinse Philip Roth a scrivere (seguendo i consigli di Stern Roth pubblicherà Addio, Columbus), e la prefazione che Roth scrive a Le figlie degli altri ne è la testimonianza, soprattutto se condensata in quella splendida frase - «Lolita scritta da Cechov» - che da sola giustificherebbe il desiderio di leggere questo romanzo. Anche se il motivo per cui ho deciso di farlo, completamente disinformata sul rapporto che legava i due scrittori, sono state le parole con le quali Stern descriveva il legame di amicizia, successivo alla loro relazione amorosa e alla morte dell’autrice, fra Roth e Janet Hobhouse. Ecco, se c’è un libro che veramente mi ha colpito in questi ultimi mesi di letture, quello è Le Furie, e le letture che ora girano intorno alle intense e “intimamente autobiografiche” parole di Hobhouse, gli sono debitrici.
Non posso dire che mi sia piaciuta questa storia di un divorzio, né che abbia provato piacere a leggerlo, ma che l’abbia letto apprezzandolo a tratti e senza coinvolgimento: la prosa è troppo cerebrale, il risultato della scelta di raccontare il percorso del disamore di un quarantenne professore di Harvard attraverso i processi biochimici o biomolecolari della materia che insegna nei confronti della moglie Sarah nel momento in cui si innamora di una giovane studentessa, e il progressivo distacco da lei, dai figli e dalla casa di famiglia a Cambridge, ha lentamente provocato in me insoddisfazione, fatto respirare un clima tanto raffinato quanto algido, emozioni che definirei ingessate.
Ecco, la sensazione a fine lettura, il pensiero che mi ha attraversato la mente subito dopo averlo finito - nonostante proprio fra le ultime pagine ci sia un passaggio sul matrimonio e sul divorzio che mi ha molto commossa e che, ahimè, credevo di aver trascritto e invece è tornato in biblioteca insieme alla copia presa in prestito) - è che la storia di Cimabue e Giotto si sia ripetuta ancora una volta.
Di Richard Stern si dice che, nel doppio ruolo di amico e mentore, fu l’uomo che convinse Philip Roth a scrivere (seguendo i consigli di Stern Roth pubblicherà Addio, Columbus), e la prefazione che Roth scrive a Le figlie degli altri ne è la testimonianza, soprattutto se condensata in quella splendida frase - «Lolita scritta da Cechov» - che da sola giustificherebbe il desiderio di leggere questo romanzo. Anche se il motivo per cui ho deciso di farlo, completamente disinformata sul rapporto che legava i due scrittori, sono state le parole con le quali Stern descriveva il legame di amicizia, successivo alla loro relazione amorosa e alla morte dell’autrice, fra Roth e Janet Hobhouse. Ecco, se c’è un libro che veramente mi ha colpito in questi ultimi mesi di letture, quello è Le Furie, e le letture che ora girano intorno alle intense e “intimamente autobiografiche” parole di Hobhouse, gli sono debitrici.
Non posso dire che mi sia piaciuta questa storia di un divorzio, né che abbia provato piacere a leggerlo, ma che l’abbia letto apprezzandolo a tratti e senza coinvolgimento: la prosa è troppo cerebrale, il risultato della scelta di raccontare il percorso del disamore di un quarantenne professore di Harvard attraverso i processi biochimici o biomolecolari della materia che insegna nei confronti della moglie Sarah nel momento in cui si innamora di una giovane studentessa, e il progressivo distacco da lei, dai figli e dalla casa di famiglia a Cambridge, ha lentamente provocato in me insoddisfazione, fatto respirare un clima tanto raffinato quanto algido, emozioni che definirei ingessate.
Ecco, la sensazione a fine lettura, il pensiero che mi ha attraversato la mente subito dopo averlo finito - nonostante proprio fra le ultime pagine ci sia un passaggio sul matrimonio e sul divorzio che mi ha molto commossa e che, ahimè, credevo di aver trascritto e invece è tornato in biblioteca insieme alla copia presa in prestito) - è che la storia di Cimabue e Giotto si sia ripetuta ancora una volta.
September 2, 2017
Just to give you a sense of what this novel is like, here's an excerpt from the book next to which I wrote "are you kidding me?":
If you do decide to read it, be warned. It is full of platitudes, saturated with medical terms, Freud, plenty of misogyny, and Freud. This is no Nabokov's Lolita.
When the sun speared out of a gray diarrhea of cloud, it turned into script – a celestial Linear B. The light struck fluorite crystals sunk in the vugs. Quartz, amazonite, corundum, beryl. Merriwether himself is most of what's colored up here: blue jeans, red LaCoste sportshirt with the green alligator, dirt-blotched white sneakers. Colorful, but not the official climber's outfit.
If you do decide to read it, be warned. It is full of platitudes, saturated with medical terms, Freud, plenty of misogyny, and Freud. This is no Nabokov's Lolita.
April 14, 2019
“He’d had the joys and difficulties of family life, he’d still have some of them, and always, always he would watch the children to see if he could fix whatever went wrong because of what he and Sarah had done.”
“Though the next day, when he came home from work, he came home to the house that no longer felt his. It was now—at least till June—Sarah’s. Yesterday it had been his. He was here now on her sufferance, she could tell him to get out, legally, as three or four times she had told him to get out emotionally. It was a strange feeling for him.”
“Maybe this is what women feel.”
———————————————-
4 stars for the redeeming second half!
In the first half of the book, the writing about the affair between Dr. Merriwether and Cynthia came across to me as sophomoric, titillating, and less than believable. That can’t all be blamed on outmoded mores, since Cynthia had cheated on her other boyfriend with no less than eight other college boys at least once. The fact an awkward, (near saintly as portrayed) 40-something Dr. Merriwether -at that experienced time in Cynthia’s life -was the first to provide her ‘awakening’ was almost laughable, pandering to men of the past...? However, the relationship between Cynthia and Merriwether did seem to grow and mature, and of course, cool with time.
Beginning with Chapter 11, the book became much more realistic and interesting, in my opinion. Merriwether’s love as a father for his children was then proven believable in the writing. His sorrow at not being there physically with them was painful.
While the author I felt was a few times unnecessarily harsh and dismissive in the portrayal of the wife, Sarah Merriwether, (nearly holding her up to ridicule a few times) the palpable contempt between man and wife as the divorce became a reality was believably portrayed.
I ended up enjoying this somewhat, but I don’t feel it stands the test of time as well as Richard Yates’ now classic Revolutionary Road, a portrayal of a 1950s struggling marriage, which was written in 1961.
“Though the next day, when he came home from work, he came home to the house that no longer felt his. It was now—at least till June—Sarah’s. Yesterday it had been his. He was here now on her sufferance, she could tell him to get out, legally, as three or four times she had told him to get out emotionally. It was a strange feeling for him.”
“Maybe this is what women feel.”
———————————————-
4 stars for the redeeming second half!
In the first half of the book, the writing about the affair between Dr. Merriwether and Cynthia came across to me as sophomoric, titillating, and less than believable. That can’t all be blamed on outmoded mores, since Cynthia had cheated on her other boyfriend with no less than eight other college boys at least once. The fact an awkward, (near saintly as portrayed) 40-something Dr. Merriwether -at that experienced time in Cynthia’s life -was the first to provide her ‘awakening’ was almost laughable, pandering to men of the past...? However, the relationship between Cynthia and Merriwether did seem to grow and mature, and of course, cool with time.
Beginning with Chapter 11, the book became much more realistic and interesting, in my opinion. Merriwether’s love as a father for his children was then proven believable in the writing. His sorrow at not being there physically with them was painful.
While the author I felt was a few times unnecessarily harsh and dismissive in the portrayal of the wife, Sarah Merriwether, (nearly holding her up to ridicule a few times) the palpable contempt between man and wife as the divorce became a reality was believably portrayed.
I ended up enjoying this somewhat, but I don’t feel it stands the test of time as well as Richard Yates’ now classic Revolutionary Road, a portrayal of a 1950s struggling marriage, which was written in 1961.
August 31, 2017
I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours of my ongoing recovery from hip replacement surgery (the right one) reading Other Men’s Daughters by Richard Stern, just republished by the New York Review of Books, a forty-years-later celebration of a writer who shouldn’t be forgotten. This is a strong novel with a flaw, like all novels, that facilitates self-indulgence on the part of its protagonist, one Robert Merriwether, doctor and professor of physiology at Harvard.
The key year is 1972. It’s summer. Merriwether comes from an old New England family and has a grand barn of an inherited house an agreeable walk across campus to his laboratory. Having been right there, right then in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1972, I can testify that Stern describes the scene (the human scene, the physical scene, the meteorological scene) perfectly. The ’60s have crested but the foam of their final waves are still bubbling on the beach–long hair, Hare Krishna celebrants, self-satisfied languor, “freedom.” In a few months, of course, we in Massachusetts would be the only ones in America favoring McGovern over Nixon, but this isn’t a political novel. It’s a social novel, and, in the wake of the 60s, that means, to a certain extent, a sexual novel.
Gorgeous Cynthia is twenty. Merriwether is forty. He has a wife from whom he’s alienated (but with whom he still lives) and four children who mean a great deal to him. He’s not wretched about his marital problems, however, and not on the prowl. He just happens to be volunteering for a little clinic duty when Cynthia comes in looking for a birth control prescription and falls for him, or wants him, or needs him, take your pick. This could have happened then or now, the kind of disruptive good luck that might, eventually if improbably, lead Merriwether out of his dead end marriage. But it does feel a bit like a fantasy trip on the part of a middle-aged male novelist, and it doesn’t feel, to me at least, like Robert Merriwether’s loss of innocence…and “our” loss of innocence… an anatomy of the legacy of the 60s.
I say that despite the fact that Stern’s highly-informed prose (he understands Harvard faculty members, their self-absorption, their quirks, perfectly) helps him handle some really tough challenges — Merriwether’s encounter with Cynthia’s disturbed father on the French Riviera, for instance, or Merriwether’s encounter with his wife’s divorce lawyer.
The novelist Philip Roth, Stern’s friend, has described Merriwether as something of a latter-day, dream-drunk Gatsby while Wendy Doniger, another writer, promotes the innocence idea in an afterword, contending that Merriwether’s journey through the destruction of his family is, I suppose, an exile from Eden.
I’m not buying it. It’s hard enough to think the under-described Cynthia really has the maturity and emotional gravity to isolate herself for a few years with Merriwether, cutting off ties with her generation. And hard enough to accept, as a reader, that the Merriwether presented is more than a narcissist who (though Stern doesn’t spell this out in dramatic detail, which is cheating) beat his wife into alienation by constantly dismissing her intellectually, cutting her off, correcting her, giving her C+ with his stare at the dinner table.
As America didn’t have a fair claim on a loss of innocence on 9/11 (the America of Vietnam, of destroying the people who first occupied this continent, of slavery), a super-smart Harvard prof doesn’t get my sympathy for the losses resulting from his excesses. Having done the Riviera one summer, Merriwether and Cynthia end up in a cabin in the Rockies another summer. They’re close to Boulder, where Merriwether can participate in an ultra-sophisticated scientific seminar and write a book … and Cynthia? Well, as on the Rivera, so in the Rockies, she kind of drifts along looking great, being plenty smart herself, and finding satisfaction in clinging to her man.
We believe the damage done to Merriwether’s children (though it doesn’t seem to be much) and we certainly believe his ex-wife’s hostility toward him, but what we don’t believe, I think, is that the 60s set us adrift with no moral compass, forcing us into emphasizing pleasure over happiness. Yes, Stern eloquently and wittily puts Merriwether through the wringer, but he’s no victim of overriding powers that cause him to lose his magnificent barn of a house in Cambridge, the tradition of Thanksgiving dinners with the whole family involved, and more than a few friends who weren’t really friends. He does all that himself. And in a sequel to this novel, if there were one, he would lose Cynthia, too.
The key year is 1972. It’s summer. Merriwether comes from an old New England family and has a grand barn of an inherited house an agreeable walk across campus to his laboratory. Having been right there, right then in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1972, I can testify that Stern describes the scene (the human scene, the physical scene, the meteorological scene) perfectly. The ’60s have crested but the foam of their final waves are still bubbling on the beach–long hair, Hare Krishna celebrants, self-satisfied languor, “freedom.” In a few months, of course, we in Massachusetts would be the only ones in America favoring McGovern over Nixon, but this isn’t a political novel. It’s a social novel, and, in the wake of the 60s, that means, to a certain extent, a sexual novel.
Gorgeous Cynthia is twenty. Merriwether is forty. He has a wife from whom he’s alienated (but with whom he still lives) and four children who mean a great deal to him. He’s not wretched about his marital problems, however, and not on the prowl. He just happens to be volunteering for a little clinic duty when Cynthia comes in looking for a birth control prescription and falls for him, or wants him, or needs him, take your pick. This could have happened then or now, the kind of disruptive good luck that might, eventually if improbably, lead Merriwether out of his dead end marriage. But it does feel a bit like a fantasy trip on the part of a middle-aged male novelist, and it doesn’t feel, to me at least, like Robert Merriwether’s loss of innocence…and “our” loss of innocence… an anatomy of the legacy of the 60s.
I say that despite the fact that Stern’s highly-informed prose (he understands Harvard faculty members, their self-absorption, their quirks, perfectly) helps him handle some really tough challenges — Merriwether’s encounter with Cynthia’s disturbed father on the French Riviera, for instance, or Merriwether’s encounter with his wife’s divorce lawyer.
The novelist Philip Roth, Stern’s friend, has described Merriwether as something of a latter-day, dream-drunk Gatsby while Wendy Doniger, another writer, promotes the innocence idea in an afterword, contending that Merriwether’s journey through the destruction of his family is, I suppose, an exile from Eden.
I’m not buying it. It’s hard enough to think the under-described Cynthia really has the maturity and emotional gravity to isolate herself for a few years with Merriwether, cutting off ties with her generation. And hard enough to accept, as a reader, that the Merriwether presented is more than a narcissist who (though Stern doesn’t spell this out in dramatic detail, which is cheating) beat his wife into alienation by constantly dismissing her intellectually, cutting her off, correcting her, giving her C+ with his stare at the dinner table.
As America didn’t have a fair claim on a loss of innocence on 9/11 (the America of Vietnam, of destroying the people who first occupied this continent, of slavery), a super-smart Harvard prof doesn’t get my sympathy for the losses resulting from his excesses. Having done the Riviera one summer, Merriwether and Cynthia end up in a cabin in the Rockies another summer. They’re close to Boulder, where Merriwether can participate in an ultra-sophisticated scientific seminar and write a book … and Cynthia? Well, as on the Rivera, so in the Rockies, she kind of drifts along looking great, being plenty smart herself, and finding satisfaction in clinging to her man.
We believe the damage done to Merriwether’s children (though it doesn’t seem to be much) and we certainly believe his ex-wife’s hostility toward him, but what we don’t believe, I think, is that the 60s set us adrift with no moral compass, forcing us into emphasizing pleasure over happiness. Yes, Stern eloquently and wittily puts Merriwether through the wringer, but he’s no victim of overriding powers that cause him to lose his magnificent barn of a house in Cambridge, the tradition of Thanksgiving dinners with the whole family involved, and more than a few friends who weren’t really friends. He does all that himself. And in a sequel to this novel, if there were one, he would lose Cynthia, too.
October 14, 2017
Very much a dead white man's book. I can only explain the praise heaped on this book by people like Philip Roth by the fact that it's easy to be generous to writers who don't threaten you. This is a campus novel cum dissolution of a marriage novel, and adds nothing to either genre. The story is mostly told from the point of view of Robert Merriwether, who leaves his wife Sarah for Cynthia, an attractive student who initiates a relationship after getting her pill prescription from him. Occasionally Stern shifts to the perspective of one or another of the women, but he quickly gets bored or out of his depth and goes back to Robert. During a spell in France Robert gets to meet Cynthia's father, who is initially outraged by his daughter being with a man his own age, but quickly becomes a fan of Robert's. However, once that is established, Mr. Ryder disappears from the story. The book ends inconclusively with Robert having an epiphany while staying in Colorado with Cynthia. Will they be happy ever after? Who cares? Stern struck me as a very clumsy story-teller, and the only joke in the book is of a character being described as "a gargoyle looking for a cathedral, a stain without a glass." Pretty feeble for 250 pages of prose.
January 21, 2019
A middle-aged professor and researcher, married with four children, leading a quietly traditional life in a small college town, blows it all up - gradually and then all of a sudden - after meeting an enchanting woman who is half his age. Another one of those novels, you ask, slightly rolling eyes? Yes, yes, I answer, but actually, not quite. Yes, because when stripping it down to its plot, it is hard to avoid making it sound as yet another cliché novel about a middle-aged male fueled by lust and ego. Not quite, because it’s not only the devil that hides in the details. Great literature roams there too – in the details, in that space between bare-boned plot, loaded dialogue, poignant, erudite observations, and a carefully sketched psychological portrait of the characters, who could have easily slipped into stereotype, but who almost miraculously avoid it by a large mile. Miracle? Of course not. They are saved by Richard Stern’s elegance and depth, his fluidity and talent, his commitment to understanding each of them. Neither of them is an example of rarified moral high ground. Each suffers of blindness, of selfishness. Each is capable of cruelty. Each is fiercely human. And the novel? Well, the novel is moving without being cloying. Subversive in an elegant, subtle, analytical, almost clinical manner.
A book about emotional turmoil and the dissolution of a marriage. About choosing between a freedom whose shape and promises are unclear and a boxed life, reduced to a sequence of scripted, unfulfilling steps. A book about divorce, but not, I think, an indictment of it, as the NY Times called it in a review. An analysis of it and an elegy to the idea of family – yes – but without being formulaic or accusatory, without clinging to the traditional family image of the 60s as its only viable embodiment. A book about transformation, both personal and societal. A book that is fiercely determined to look at both humans and their lives through a non-binary lens, refusing to label them as good, bad, wrong or right, and instead trying to understand the different nuances of bittersweet.
Not flawless, but high-class literature nevertheless.
A book about emotional turmoil and the dissolution of a marriage. About choosing between a freedom whose shape and promises are unclear and a boxed life, reduced to a sequence of scripted, unfulfilling steps. A book about divorce, but not, I think, an indictment of it, as the NY Times called it in a review. An analysis of it and an elegy to the idea of family – yes – but without being formulaic or accusatory, without clinging to the traditional family image of the 60s as its only viable embodiment. A book about transformation, both personal and societal. A book that is fiercely determined to look at both humans and their lives through a non-binary lens, refusing to label them as good, bad, wrong or right, and instead trying to understand the different nuances of bittersweet.
Not flawless, but high-class literature nevertheless.
December 28, 2019
I jumped into this thinking it’ll be some raunchy, steamy dirty novel about a married man having relations with his student. Not. It was about a married man suffering with his loneliness. Meeting someone else, having an affair and the consequence of a divorce with children. Truly not something I’d pick up to read. It was a delight. I liked Merriwether’s ramblings. Felt for him.
“Maybe human beings who love each other should only present their best face to each other, saving their miseries for silence, dark and the pillow. Only masochists can tolerate lifetimes of complaint.”
“Maybe human beings who love each other should only present their best face to each other, saving their miseries for silence, dark and the pillow. Only masochists can tolerate lifetimes of complaint.”
July 10, 2019
3,75
June 5, 2019
Llego a la última página con la boca abierta por la admiración. No recuerdo ahora mismo otro libro que cuente más y mejor sobre las consecuencias de la pasión amorosa.
August 17, 2018
The grass is seldom greener on the other side. Merriwether, learned the hard way of how one act of indiscretion cannot but affect one individual, but ultimately be the demise of an entire family’s happiness.
What was most disturbing is how Merriwether and Cynthia (his student) were able to casually have this thing and yet he and his wife’s family and friends went along with it without regards to Sarah his wife or their children.
Sadly, today we still see teachers giving in to their sexual desires and being the cause of lost innocence.
This story also brought up a controversial topic.
“He thought of Cynthia only three or four times.”
‘A month later, Merriweather was completely surprised by a postcard from Cynthia.
“I’ve been here a week. You asked for this. Here I am. Thinking about it now, I must admit I love you madly. I’d like to see you and tell you, back every word you’ve told me. Then I will ask you if you love me. If you smiled, I would understand.”
This leads to the questions, is it a lot easier for a man to get over a woman? If then, why?
It also makes one think of how long some educators have on many occasions usurped their authority by having romantic relationships with their scholars. Have things become better with years in regards to this topic or stayed the same? How far has this world come?
Though, I laughed at some of the “uppity” wit of the intelligentsia, I still was deeply compelled by the grievous nature of this narrative.
I thoroughly enjoyed this this work by Richard Stern.
What was most disturbing is how Merriwether and Cynthia (his student) were able to casually have this thing and yet he and his wife’s family and friends went along with it without regards to Sarah his wife or their children.
Sadly, today we still see teachers giving in to their sexual desires and being the cause of lost innocence.
This story also brought up a controversial topic.
“He thought of Cynthia only three or four times.”
‘A month later, Merriweather was completely surprised by a postcard from Cynthia.
“I’ve been here a week. You asked for this. Here I am. Thinking about it now, I must admit I love you madly. I’d like to see you and tell you, back every word you’ve told me. Then I will ask you if you love me. If you smiled, I would understand.”
This leads to the questions, is it a lot easier for a man to get over a woman? If then, why?
It also makes one think of how long some educators have on many occasions usurped their authority by having romantic relationships with their scholars. Have things become better with years in regards to this topic or stayed the same? How far has this world come?
Though, I laughed at some of the “uppity” wit of the intelligentsia, I still was deeply compelled by the grievous nature of this narrative.
I thoroughly enjoyed this this work by Richard Stern.
September 8, 2017
Superb, crystal clear prose.
I will just sum up my review with these quotes that pretty much says it all;
"He had left her chewed bones for years "
" it became impossible for me Sarah.I am not a cactus. I couldn't endure without intimacy.
I have been driven to the wall".
"Twenty years in one bed,and the contraction of their lives issued in grunts "
" under the stone of their last years were thousands of moments which were not stony"
" the energy of love,the sexual energy, the excess which made for tenderness and generosity dried up in anxiety ".
By now, you have realized what the theme of this novel was about; yes... that's is it... divorce, a man's loss of innocence and the loss of his family. A profound read.
I will just sum up my review with these quotes that pretty much says it all;
"He had left her chewed bones for years "
" it became impossible for me Sarah.I am not a cactus. I couldn't endure without intimacy.
I have been driven to the wall".
"Twenty years in one bed,and the contraction of their lives issued in grunts "
" under the stone of their last years were thousands of moments which were not stony"
" the energy of love,the sexual energy, the excess which made for tenderness and generosity dried up in anxiety ".
By now, you have realized what the theme of this novel was about; yes... that's is it... divorce, a man's loss of innocence and the loss of his family. A profound read.
October 2, 2018
Unnerving treasure.
The story of a privileged misogynist.... how timely. Actually, at least equally the story of divorce as a process for self-justification by a clueless, despicable, shallow and self-righteous man, from the generation that perpetuated preconceived gender notions that persist, unfortunately, to this day. Brilliantly written by Stern - a man - who depicts a sad person more connected with institutions, like “marriage” and Harvard, than people, whom he does not in the least understand other than to objectify them. No wonder he is a physiologist.
The story of a privileged misogynist.... how timely. Actually, at least equally the story of divorce as a process for self-justification by a clueless, despicable, shallow and self-righteous man, from the generation that perpetuated preconceived gender notions that persist, unfortunately, to this day. Brilliantly written by Stern - a man - who depicts a sad person more connected with institutions, like “marriage” and Harvard, than people, whom he does not in the least understand other than to objectify them. No wonder he is a physiologist.
January 10, 2018
This 1970's NYT review immaculately articulates my reading experience of this great book.
http://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/18/arc...
http://www.nytimes.com/1973/11/18/arc...
May 8, 2022
Every time someone asked me recently to describe what I’m reading I’d tell them it’s kind of the exact cliché that comes to mind when you imagine what white guy literary fiction was like in the ‘70s. And it is! A 40ish-year-old professor/husband/father starts sleeping with, then seriously dating, a 22-year-old grad student behind his wife’s back, and naturally it leads to The Big D (divorce). But it’s GOOD ‘70s white guy literary fiction! I love a book that is entirely nonjudgmental of its characters, sympathetic even when they’re making horrible life-shattering decisions and being oblivious of it, and this is definitely that. Sensitive, quiet, often very rough, but with a huge well of warmth and understanding for all its emotionally stunted characters and their individual anxieties and flaws. I liked it!
April 29, 2019
Me ha impactado este libro (publicado en 1973), aunque ambientado en el verano de 1960, en la universidad de Harvard, periodo durante el cual el profesor Merriwether, un sujeto aparentemente conformista y poco impulsivo, cede a la tentación de acostarse con una alumna... y a partir de ahí su vida dará un giro de 360º...
Todo y que por el contenido me recordaba a "Desgracia" de Coetzee (cabe mencionar que esta obra fue publicada posteriormente en 1999) la narrativa de Richard G. Stern me ha cautivado por su sinceridad. Me sucede con poca frecuencia que un autor me transmite lo que quizás llamaría el don sublime de la escritura... como si todo ocurriera del modo que debe ocurrir... personajes perfectamente articulados en una trama que se desarrolla como no podría ser de otra manera y al mismo tiempo... sorprendente... Como la vida misma. Cuando veo ese talento en un libro, recuerdo la razón por la que siempre ando ansiosa leyendo libros... tratando de buscar otra obra que posea esa calidad... Y "Las hijas de otros hombres" sin duda la posee.
Muy recomendable.
Todo y que por el contenido me recordaba a "Desgracia" de Coetzee (cabe mencionar que esta obra fue publicada posteriormente en 1999) la narrativa de Richard G. Stern me ha cautivado por su sinceridad. Me sucede con poca frecuencia que un autor me transmite lo que quizás llamaría el don sublime de la escritura... como si todo ocurriera del modo que debe ocurrir... personajes perfectamente articulados en una trama que se desarrolla como no podría ser de otra manera y al mismo tiempo... sorprendente... Como la vida misma. Cuando veo ese talento en un libro, recuerdo la razón por la que siempre ando ansiosa leyendo libros... tratando de buscar otra obra que posea esa calidad... Y "Las hijas de otros hombres" sin duda la posee.
Muy recomendable.
Read
June 1, 2018I don’t know about the rest of you but I learned to read off my father’s bookshelf, a vast-seeming library which consisted more or less exclusively of raw, pulpy fantasy and a lot of heavy, hyper masculine 20th century authors – Hemingway, John Barth, that sort of thing. Some of these guys – Saul Bellow, for instance – I would totally unhesitatingly describe as geniuses. Some of these guys were not. In any event, most of the literature I was exposed to as a youth had magic swords or brilliant, angst-ridden narrators with unhealthy relations towards woman. At 18 I thought like, half of all books were about professors at Ivy league colleges dealing with problems brought on by an exaggerated testosterone and general jackassery. This was probably a lot of the reason I stopped reading fiction between like, 20 and 25, frankly, and in recent years I’ve been kind of gun shy about dipping my toe back into the waters.
But I’m more or less happy I set aside that prejudice for this one, an excellent entry in the Roth/Irving/Updike milieu, about an affair between a professor and a co-ed which ends his marriage. Stern has a pretty extraordinary gift for prose, as well as a real insight into character’s beyond the protagonist, who come across as fully realized and human in a way that the weaker novels in this genre tend to fail it. There is a peculiar lack of tragedy to the story which, one feels, goes hand in hand with Stern’s ability to empathize with his characters If the narrator is an authorial surrogate, than at least Stern has forgiven himself. Which, I mean, depending upon how much of a moralist you are might piss you off, but at least it felt a little new.
But I’m more or less happy I set aside that prejudice for this one, an excellent entry in the Roth/Irving/Updike milieu, about an affair between a professor and a co-ed which ends his marriage. Stern has a pretty extraordinary gift for prose, as well as a real insight into character’s beyond the protagonist, who come across as fully realized and human in a way that the weaker novels in this genre tend to fail it. There is a peculiar lack of tragedy to the story which, one feels, goes hand in hand with Stern’s ability to empathize with his characters If the narrator is an authorial surrogate, than at least Stern has forgiven himself. Which, I mean, depending upon how much of a moralist you are might piss you off, but at least it felt a little new.
August 1, 2017
If you're reading this then by now you've seen my other books I've read this year. Yes, I'm OBSESSED with the NYRB Classics but while I would have read this anyway the main reason was the introduction by Philip Roth my favorite writer of all time. Richard Stern has all the qualities and similarities that Philip Roth would find in common. He states that he's a long time friend of Stern's and after reading Other Men's Daughters I really hope that this is just the beginning of the world getting to know and read this author. After breezing through this in a couple of days (sorry for just getting to this review) I was taken aback as to why he hasn't been discussed in the same conversations with authors of that time (John Updike, Philip Roth, James Salter, John Cheever)
Does the world need another upper middle class New Englander spilling his guts? Probably not, but what this book sets apart is the complete openness that Merriweather lets us in on. Sad, heartbreaking but the hope he has with a new life is beautiful. I hope he reaches that summit in Colorado one day. I'm sure he'll get there.
Does the world need another upper middle class New Englander spilling his guts? Probably not, but what this book sets apart is the complete openness that Merriweather lets us in on. Sad, heartbreaking but the hope he has with a new life is beautiful. I hope he reaches that summit in Colorado one day. I'm sure he'll get there.
June 25, 2018
I kind of wanted to hate this at times, but then I kind of ended up liking it a lot. Story of a crumbling marriage in the Cambridge/Harvard milieu of the early 1970s.
August 6, 2018
“Si credeva che il corpo diventasse più «sensibile» quanto più diventava profondo. Ma no, è come la terra stessa, la vivacità è alla superficie. Puoi schiacciare un organo e non sentire dolore, ma guarda la pelle. Un centimetro di pelle umana contiene due macchine sensoriali per il freddo, dodici per il caldo, tre milioni di cellule, dieci peli, quindici ghiandole sebacee, un metro di vasi sanguigni, cento ghiandole sudorifere, tremila cellule sensoriali all’estremità delle fibre nervose, quattro metri di nervi, venticinque punti cutanei sensibili alla pressione per gli stimoli tattili, duecento cellule nervose per registrare il dolore. Questa fantastica fabbrica è la nostra superficie. Non c’è da meravigliarsi che i nostri sentimenti siano così esposti. Abbiamo il cuore in mano.” (p. 62)
September 6, 2021
“Nothing that happens is unnatural”. p. 113
November 1, 2013
Many a 2013 tribute to the late Richard Stern included some variation on the theme of the greatest writer you never knew. Roth, Updike and Bellow were liberally quoted praising his grace, erudition and wit. These are qualities better shown in his novel Other Men’s Daughters than his “orderly miscellany” Still On Call.
In 1973 in the midst of social revolution Harvard physician and professor Robert Merriwether and Harvard Summer School student Cynthia Ryder began an affair that will overturn his settled if not satisfying life. Philip Roth said “the theme is Leaving Home, departing the familiar and the cherished for erotic renewal; Stern’s accomplishment (here, as in all of his work) is to locate precisely the comedy and the pains of a particularly contemporary phenomenon without exaggeration, animus or operatic ideology.” I agree.
There is grace, erudition, wit, comedy and pain aplenty in the vignettes of Merriwether’s wife, four children and esteemed colleagues before and after the divorce which grounds the lighthearted joy of renewal in the legal, financial, social, and psychological ramifications of adultery.
All of this is missing from Stern’s 2010 Still On Call which reads as an unedited collection of notes that might have someday been turned into a novel or booklength essay. As in my comments on How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields, I find Stern’s “orderly miscellany”, another surrender to lack of structure. Shields and Stern and their readers would have benefited from editors forcing the authors to organize their notes into books rather than foisting miscellaneous collages upon us.
In 1973 in the midst of social revolution Harvard physician and professor Robert Merriwether and Harvard Summer School student Cynthia Ryder began an affair that will overturn his settled if not satisfying life. Philip Roth said “the theme is Leaving Home, departing the familiar and the cherished for erotic renewal; Stern’s accomplishment (here, as in all of his work) is to locate precisely the comedy and the pains of a particularly contemporary phenomenon without exaggeration, animus or operatic ideology.” I agree.
There is grace, erudition, wit, comedy and pain aplenty in the vignettes of Merriwether’s wife, four children and esteemed colleagues before and after the divorce which grounds the lighthearted joy of renewal in the legal, financial, social, and psychological ramifications of adultery.
All of this is missing from Stern’s 2010 Still On Call which reads as an unedited collection of notes that might have someday been turned into a novel or booklength essay. As in my comments on How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields, I find Stern’s “orderly miscellany”, another surrender to lack of structure. Shields and Stern and their readers would have benefited from editors forcing the authors to organize their notes into books rather than foisting miscellaneous collages upon us.
August 22, 2023
Anna Karenina being mentioned in this book is perhaps the best indicator of what this book is about.
In some ways, Robert Merriweather and Anna Karenina are alike: both begin affairs that upend their lives in terrible ways. Except Robert actually ends up relatively unscathed, whereas Anna ends up very scathed.
And, in another sense, Merriweather's life stays relatively the same after everything that happened. That, I think, was one of the questions Stern sought to answer with this book.
Other Men's Daughters is a smartly written novel that is not entirely about affairs, or immoral love, or the questionable age gap between Merriweather and his mistress-turned-girlfriend. It is, at its core, about divorce and the effects it has on divorcees.
Stern's question and answer both revolve around the capacity to survive divorce, not only for those who seek it, but for their children, their friends and family, and their careers as well. In essence, this novel asks whether the modern person and the modern family can survive and coexist with divorce.
Clever, to the point, and brimming with intelligence, Stern asks an importantly modern question for an increasingly modern age.
In some ways, Robert Merriweather and Anna Karenina are alike: both begin affairs that upend their lives in terrible ways. Except Robert actually ends up relatively unscathed, whereas Anna ends up very scathed.
And, in another sense, Merriweather's life stays relatively the same after everything that happened. That, I think, was one of the questions Stern sought to answer with this book.
Other Men's Daughters is a smartly written novel that is not entirely about affairs, or immoral love, or the questionable age gap between Merriweather and his mistress-turned-girlfriend. It is, at its core, about divorce and the effects it has on divorcees.
Stern's question and answer both revolve around the capacity to survive divorce, not only for those who seek it, but for their children, their friends and family, and their careers as well. In essence, this novel asks whether the modern person and the modern family can survive and coexist with divorce.
Clever, to the point, and brimming with intelligence, Stern asks an importantly modern question for an increasingly modern age.
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