The Hills at Home - Couverture rigide

Clark, Nancy

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 037542203X ISBN 13 : 9780375422034

Editeur : Pantheon Books, 2003

Synopsis

During the summer of 1989, three generations of the Hill family arrive at the New England home of the family matriarch and maiden aunt, Lily, for a visit, but as the weeks go by, no one shows any signs of leaving. A first novel. 35,000 first printing.

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter One
The Hills Come Home

Outside, the night blew perfectly foul and all of the Hills had stayed home. Rain flung itself by the fistful against the clapboards, rain spangled the windowpanes, and the rain bore down so hard against the roof that shots bounced up from the slates and rained down again in shattery shards and splinters. The wind wheeled round and the startled rain skidded sideways. The rain sought, the rain battered, the rain invaded. This was an extravagant rain, as if somewhere, somehow, someone, miserly and profligate in turn, had been amassing rain until he possessed enough to hurl down fiercely and decisively upon the helplessly spinning earth.

The house stood alone out in the relative countryside of what used to be known as an old Yankee town, no longer situated so very far to the north of Boston. The house, whose rows of windows were goldenly, blurrily alight against the ragings of the night, could only be half seen, through the tattered last of the October leaves, from a high point on the River Road which was, at present, mildly flooding along its low point. Drivers-by, the few drivers-by taking the windy route easy over the shimmery beech-leaf litter lying like slippery minnows across the pavement, thought the house resembled nothing so much as an ocean liner caught in elegant passage gliding toward a farther horizon. To enhance the passers-by fancies, a sea-salt and sea-creature whiff of mudflats was conveyed upon the east wind as it soughed through an opened dashboard vent, conversational fog having whitened the windshield of a dark sedan nosing up the road.

“I understand Lily has her hands full,” said its driver, a woman who knew a little of the Hills’ situation, “with that crew she’s got there with her these days.”

“Oh?” asked her companions, encouragingly.

But if this was not a night to be out, this was not necessarily a night to be in. As the rain hardened, basins and pots were fetched from the closets where they were stored between storms and positioned beneath the usual roof leaks. The telephones kept ringing themselves, blurting or bewailingly pealing, and the electricity flickered off and on to add another element to everyone’s measure of unease. There had been a single daybright bolt of lightning and one warning growl of thunder earlier and no one in the house quite yet dared to run the risk of making toast.

They, that crew, Lily’s family, had all come for visits the summer past and none of them had gone away again in the fall. The weekend stretched into a week, the week became weeks, the weeks accumulated into a month, the months made up a season, and then the season changed. Oh, Lily ought to have been warier. Their suitcases ought to have struck her as having been very thoroughly packed as she bumped their luggage up the stairs and hefted the ornery, strapped-shut grips onto the foots of their freshly made-up beds. She ought to have let their bags languish in the front hall wherever they had dropped them, however underfoot their effects might have remained, there where they were, crumpling the carpet pattern and nicking the shaky old legs of the deacon’s bench and tripping up the careless returnees who would be too excitedly chattering and ranging about all at once on sorties of rediscovery and reclamation to mind their ways.

Surely, Lily should have made them bide their time on the terrace flagstones and finish the tall glasses of iced tea she had carried outside on an overburdened tole-ware tray. They ought to have been required to give good accounts of themselves and to stand close questions concerning the glossed-over parts of their narratives. At the very least, Lily should have let them ask which rooms were to be theirs. She ought to have leaned back on a terrace chaise and obliged them to campaign obliquely or openly, according to temperament, for assignment to the bedroom remembered as a favorite one—with a view of the river; with the framed print rendering of a nearly nude Squanto welcoming Miles Standish, overdressed in his flimsy jeweler’s-art armor, to a rather too tropically fruited and plumed New World; or, best, the big square front-facing chamber containing the electrified invalid’s bed, which, shuddering and creaking at the really determined press of a handheld button, closed up like a clamshell. They’d been sorry to learn the invalid’s bed had been rented and returned after the last wave of old people’s illnesses and deaths back in the mid-seventies. Sorry to hear, and surprised as well by Lily’s owning to the fact of a rented deathbed in a house where, as Alden said, even the fused clump of peppermint drops kept in the domed dish on the big parlor mantelpiece was, surely, the original fused clump.

Yes, there was a footing Lily ought to have established at the outset but that had never been the family’s way, for all of the Hills had been raised to regard the old house in Towne as home whether they had been reared there or in some other place. The Hills lived, if not in exile, then as self-perceived expatriates in midwestern suburbs and at New York addresses where they could be tiresome on the subject of Towne. No one else quite understood the unswerving attraction, even after they’d been shown photos of the graceful Towne green and the view from the River Road bridge, and been told about the deep-voiced frogs who lived in the swamps, and who, the Hills said, said, Mud, mud, mud. Some salmon urge to return must have been encoded in their DNA, non-Hills privately decided, but Lily, even as she grumbled to herself, even as she paid the property taxes year after year and continued to worry about the roof and ran her vacuum cleaner once a week back and forth over the floorboards and carpets and stair treads, might have answered back to the mutters of outsiders, No, not salmon urge but soul, were she less reluctant to speak the word outside of Morning Prayer at All Saints’— a word which, of late, Lily had been less frequently speaking in that venue, having lapsed in her regular attendance. She liked the new rector. He spoke the General Confession like someone with a clear but not complacent conscience. He did not need watching.

And so Lily had, according to custom, arranged welcoming vases of narcissi, and then iris, and later, roses, to set upon their bureau tops on the days of their arrivals. She had greeted them at the door or the top of the driveway, smilingly enough. She hoped on their behalves for fair weather. She pepped up the first-night supper menus with piccalilli and cottage cheese spread on Ritz crackers for before, and she baked batches of Congo Bars for after, a lavishing of hospitality, really, which must have given them all the idea that Lily delighted to have them, a sentiment to which, in the long run, they were bound to hold her.

Her brother Harvey had been the first to return, on a cold day in May.

“Lily?” Harvey was abrupt on the telephone. “Be there Thursday,” he had said and then dropped the receiver as if from a height. He had been living on his own for a while now and Lily guessed he had already held a conversation with her in his head during which he had gone into the pertinent details.

On that Thursday, Harvey had barged through the front door without knocking, and he planted himself on the threshold of the big parlor inhaling its still, chilly air as if he meant to acclimatize himself before taking on the high-rising staircase. Lily had followed behind as he made a beeline for his boyhood bedroom which, like Thebes, was much altered but remained a place on his mind’s map. The brand-new wallpaper, at long last made necessary by a pipe-burst the previous January, was not very nice, its pattern a drift of lavender daisies and skimming butterflies with pinches and elderly faces and horns on their heads, and Lily heard herself apologizing for the new paper but Harvey said he had never much cared for the old stuff which had been a marshy scene of ducks who looked too fat to fly and knickerbockered hunters standing elegantly about and nipping from their flasks of whiskey. Poor Marjorie had had to improvise an eyeshade, he said, last time, on their last visit, last year. There had been something malign about those ducks, Marjorie had felt.

“Think she must have been spoiling for something even then,” Harvey said.

He leaned against his boyhood window, one knee levered onto the wide sill, his nose bent and blowing smoke upon a pane of glass. Slim saplings had turned into sturdy trees and a loose line of faux-colonial homes and lawn-service green lawns had advanced beyond the village limits, and even a bit of Boston showed now, or, at any rate, evidence of the city, a browny-yellow smudging of the southern sky, which may have been just as well; the way Boston was going he’d need to keep an eye on the place.

“You’ve let everything go,” he told Lily, as if the shaggy trees and the march of houses had been her doing, as if, somehow, she had failed to resist, the lone figure pushing back the raised blade of a bulldozer. He would have heard, had Lily made the effort. She would have been in the papers as a matter of human interest.

He turned from Lily as she frowned at him and he fiddled at his bureau top, strewing a shoehorn, spare change, a pocketknife plucked from his pocket across the drawn-thread bureau scarf. Lily wouldn’t have given him such a nice one had she known he’d become such a clutterer. He unfolded the standing triptych frame of his wives’ photos, the late Amy, and later Naomi, and his latest, Marjorie, as he referred to them when, occasionally, he recalled one or another’s ability to perform some necessary task—sewing on a last-minute replacement button while he remained inside his shirt (Amy) or speaking French to the French people in France (Marjorie). Naomi, the middle wife, like a middle child had ...

Revue de presse

“A graceful, intelligent, and very funny chronicle of a large, extended family beneath one

capacious roof.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Jane Austen is alive. What’s more shocking, the grandmother of social satire has moved in with Jonathan Franzen, and the two of them have produced a love child called The Hills at Home. . . . The wittiest family portrait in years.” –The Christian Science Monitor

“There’s no averting eyes from Clark’s story, which includes family intrigue, gossip, romance and, of course, more than a few gin and tonics.” –Chicago Tribune

“Delicious. . . . Gently but precisely satiric.” –New York Newsday

“Like a jumbo-sized Shakespearean comedy. . . . Leisurely in its pace and lavish in its detail, with a humor that ranges from arch to zany.” –The Seattle Times

“Imbued with a sweet intelligence that brings each member of the title family to vivid life. . . . Clark has created each character with a unique, stubbornly individualistic voice and parcels the narrative among them as deftly as Becky divides the after-dinner pies.”–Houston Chronicle

“Delightful. . . . Sets a new standard for modern family novels, a 20th century Trollope. . . . Offers a harvest ground of subtle, smile-out-loud hilarity.” –BookPage

“Witty. . . . Charming, old-fashioned, and leisurely: Reminiscent of Elizabeth Bowen or Muriel Spark, with petty strifes rendered truly as both comic (in their pettiness) and poignant (in their strife).” –Kirkus Reviews

“A warm, amusing and sparkling domestic comedy of manners. . . . Colorful and lively.” –Publishers Weekly

“Narrated with great intelligence and subtle humor . . . accomplished, invigorating. . . . Clark has a keen eye and an outrageous gift for wry understatement.” –Bookforum

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Pantheon Books
• Date d'édition: 2003
• ISBN 10: 037542203X
• ISBN 13: 9780375422034
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 481
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible