She lives with her family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Harrisville, Michigan. Her other novels are The Tarnished Eye, Second Heaven, Killing Time in St. Judith Guest won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Ordinary People, which was made into the Academy Award-winning 1980 film of the same name.
Father and son, however, have closed the gap between them.
This leads to strain in the marriage as he finds Beth increasingly cold and distant, while she in turn believes he is overly concerned about Conrad to the point of being manipulated.įinally the friction becomes enough that Beth decides to leave him at the novel's climax.
Berger as the events of the recent past have caused him to begin to doubt many things he once took for granted, leading to a midlife crisis. Also helping is a relationship with a new girlfriend, Jeannine Pratt.Ĭalvin, too, sees Dr. his identity crisis and survivor's guilt over having survived when Buck did not. Berger and comes to terms with the root cause of his depression. Initially resistant, he slowly starts to respond to Dr. His father, a successful tax attorney, gently leans on him to make appointments to see a local psychiatrist, Dr. He is attending school and trying to resume his life, but knows he still has unresolved issues, particularly with his mother, Beth, who has never really recovered from Jordan's death and keeps an almost maniacally perfect household and family. His parents committed him to a psychiatric hospital from which he has only recently returned. Six months later, a severely depressed Conrad attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor in the bathroom. It is slightly more than a year since the elder of their two teenaged sons, Jordan (nicknamed "Buck"), was killed when a sudden storm came up while he and his younger brother Conrad were sailing on Lake Michigan.
The novel begins as life is seemingly returning to normal for the Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois, in September 1975.
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