Grace Abounding

by Maureen Howard

Maud Dowd and her daughter, Elizabeth, search for the meaning of their lives amidst tragedy, fantasy, and misconceptions, past and present, about their families, each other, and themselves

175 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Maureen Howard is the author of seven novels, including Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History, all of which were nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. 'Facts of Life' is an award-winning autobiography. She is a 1952 Smith College alumnae and has taught at a number of American universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Amherst, and Yale, and was recently awarded the Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Old Man JP · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the past several years I've been concentrating on reading literary award winning authors and books and one of the awards that I've focused on recently has been the Dos Passos Prize. There have been some outstanding writers that I've discovered among that list but also some duds and I'm afraid that Maureen Howard falls into the latter category. I read one of her books previously and it was okay but this one can only be described as bad. It's about a recently widowed woman named Maude and her daughter Elizabeth. The story is told in various stages of their lives each a few years apart. Howard wrote in a somewhat poetic manner but her sentences had no cohesion. She would start out saying one thing but drift into something else in the same sentence without really saying anything. I won't say it was completely incoherent but at times it came close.

[Marianne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the kind of fiction that turned me off literary fiction back in the 90s. I kept reading because the characters start out interesting, the writing is good, it gave me nostalgia for the 80s, and because it's short. I wanted to like it, but it just disappointed. It's like a series of loosely connected short stories with no point and also vaguely depressing. It reminds me of the kinds of things I read in my postmodern literature class, none of which stuck with me in any meaningful way. What did I gain from reading this book? I don't know. Probably nothing.

[Tobreth Hansen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't get a real plot. Just following a widow woman and her daughter and a neighbor on whom she spies, jump ahead several years to her remarried and her daughter married and pregnant, jump ahead again, follow daughter's husband for a bit, follow the new husband for a bit, then his son. I didn't get it. Waste of time. No "dazzling mother-daughter relations ships."