Frances and Bernard
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
It is not love at first sight for Frances and Bernard.
She finds him faintly ridiculous while he sees her as aloof. But after that first meeting, Bernard writes Frances a letter which changes everything and soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can alter the course of lives. They find their way to New York and discover cramped West Village kitchens, rowdy cocktail parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all and long talks along the Hudson River as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above.
Irresistibly witty and deeply moving, Frances and Bernard is a story of kindred spirits and the people who help us discover who we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Frances and Bernard are writers. She's a novelist who studied at Iowa, Catholic, a bit prim, but tart-tongued. He's a poet, descended from Puritans but a convert to Catholicism, prone to fits of mania. They meet in the late 1950s in a writer's colony and become friends. If this sounds like Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell, it should: Frances and Bernard are their fictionalized avatars, with Frances the more fictional, since she's neither Southern nor suffering from an incurable disease. Short but satisfying, this epistolary novel covers roughly nine years, as Frances and Bernard grow closer, at first through letters, then visits, always fending off questions from themselves and others about whether they could be more than friends. If Bauer makes things better for O'Connor than they were in actuality, she does it without cheating on her characters, who, whatever their real life inspirations, are fictional and obligated only to work in that form. Bauer's debut novel (after her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl) is well written, engrossing, and succeeds in making Frances and Bernard's shared interest in religion believable and their relationship funny, sweet, and sad. A lovely surprise.
