Mrs. Hornstien
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Every so often a writer invents a story whose simplicity cannot disguise for more than a few moments a work of radiant beauty and sustained power. Mrs. Hornstien is such a book.
With a raw lyricism all her own, Fredrica Wagman writes of family, of passing generations, of love and striving, of grief and loss and renewal. Her narrator, Marty, begins with a day burned in her memory, when, as a young woman in love, she meets her future mother-in-law, Mrs. Hornstien. She ends her tale many years later, now a matriarch herself, poised to meet her own son's future bride.
Within the elegantly drawn arc of this natural succession Wagman gathers with unsparing honesty more than one lifetime's worth of wisdom about women's lives and the human experience. And standing stalwartly at the center of this pageant is the unforgettable figure of Mrs. Hornstien—a formidable being whose huge heart is, nonetheless, more than capable of being broken.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When timid, 17-year-old Marty Fish's boyfriend, Albert Hornstien, takes her to meet his mother, Golda, Marty thinks she seems "more like an apartment house or a bank or a department store than a regular woman.... There was something enormous about her." Regal and overbearing in her palatial, gray satin-lined Philadelphia apartment, the formidable matriarch presides over her husband and two children with a grand and all-encompassing ruthlessness. "Whatever the Boss Lady says!" is the family's sarcastic refrain. After Albert announces his engagement to the socially inferior Marty, Golda goes to bed for a week. However, she then accepts defeat gracefully, and the two women eventually achieve a touching relationship. Told in Marty's understated but increasingly wise voice, the novella sparely yet evocatively limns the relationship between Mrs. Hornstien and her daughter-in-law across a span of 30 years, through tragedies and other life-shaping events. Though Golda is a tough old bird, she eventually becomes a figure of valor and pathos as she deals with her husband's illness and death and then her own failing health. Marty learns to love and respect her mother-in-law, calling her "the real teacher of my life.'' Marty's own greedy and demanding mother, a monster of selfishness and cynicism, almost destroys her daughter's capacity for happiness. As Marty develops from a sad and insecure teenager into a woman who enjoys love and endures loss, Wagman (Playing House) demonstrates with a merciless eye the class differences between Marty's left-leaning Jewish-American family and the nouveau-riche Hornstiens. But she is compassionate in conveying the complicated emotions that bind a family. Her decision to sprinkle dialogue with capitalized words may irritate some readers, but this honest, humane and surprising book rises high above that flawed device. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour. Rights: Harriet Wasserman Agency.
