Maine

Maine tells the story of the Kellehers, an Irish Catholic family from Massachusetts who spend their summers at the family home in Maine. Sullivan tells the story through the eyes of several women including Alice, the matriarch, Ann Marie, her long suffering daughter in law, Kathleen, her daughter that escaped to California, and Maggie, her granddaughter who seems to be the one who brings them together. The story spins out over the course of a summer as Alice makes a secret, life changing decision without consulting her family. She also confronts her guilt over the death of her sister. The final sentence continues to haunt me.

The library director recommended this as one of his favorite books of the year last year. I can't wait to talk to show more him about it at our next meeting and get his take on that last sentence!

Definitely recommended. My RLBG read The Cliffs and it was good, but this was better. I have added Sullivan's other books to my TBR list. show less

I enjoyed this quite a lot. I think coming from a big Catholic family with lots of women who are of an age with the main characters really helped this come together for me. Much of it seemed very, very real.

Alice, the matriarch of the Kellehar family is really a rotten old apple. Sure, she has some demons, but is seems like she's been rotten since the beginning. Her husband seems almost too perfect and I am still not sure if we're supposed to believe that she loved him or that she just tolerated him in order to get to heaven.

I liked the ambiguous ending to the book, too.

I want a follow up where were learn more about all the screwed up men in the family!

I liked Commencement, but I loved this. Although I enjoyed everyone's sections equally - grandmother Alice, daughter Kathleen, daughter-in-law Ann Marie, granddaughter Maggie - Maggie was my favorite character, though this could just be due to the fact that she's closest to my age, as well as being the sanest and kindest of the four. I don't know how one goes about writing a book this huge in scope and insight; I'm tremendously impressed by the depth of the characters, the authenticity of the setting in various times and places, and the rendering of the family dynamic. Julia Glass's The Widower's Tale meets Jennifer Haigh's Faith. Multigenerational, complex female characters.

Alice has always struggled with uncharitable feelings - show more jealousy, stubbornness, selfishness - and her guilt is compounded a hundredfold when her sister dies and she feels responsible. Born to a wealthier family or in a more liberal, modern time, Alice still might have been able to follow her dream: live independently and be an artist. Instead, she feels forced to marry and have children she does not want.

Kathleen, Alice's oldest child, has grown up, escaped a bad marriage, raised two children, quit drinking, and moved with her boyfriend to California. Yet her hard-won serenity and contentedness cannot withstand interactions with her family, particularly her mother, brother, and sister-in-law.

Ann Marie married Alice's youngest child, Patrick, and calls Alice "Mom." She is the perfect wife, mother, and daughter-in-law, but feels that no one appreciates all of her hard work (she has a point, but one can also see why Kathleen thinks she may as well have "martyr" stamped on her forehead).

Maggie is Kathleen's daughter; 32, living in Brooklyn, making a living as a writer, her only real flaw is terrible taste in men. Now she is pregnant and has to decide what to do.

By the end of the book, all four women end up at the family's place in Maine (surprise!). This is beautiful, heart-wrenching, truthful fiction at its best.

*

And why bother coming up, year after year, when it only made her feel lonely, longing for something she'd already had? (Alice, 21)

But maybe your family could never give you the perfect response, the kindest reply. Maybe their vision of you was too tied up in their hopes and fears for them to ever really see you as just you. Perhaps that's why her mother had gone so far away in the end - to be seen clearly, to see others that way. (Maggie, 170)

It was so bitter and sad, looking for safety in the person least likely to give it to you. Like drinking saltwater, she thought. (Maggie, 211)

Like even if there was no God there was always the ocean - before you and after you, breathing in and out for all eternity. (Maggie, 257)

Parenthood by its very nature was the only job she know of in which being successful meant rendering yourself useless. (Ann Marie, 275)

...the peculiar sensation of caring terribly, insanely, for a person over whom you had no control; a person who was your responsibility yet no longer had to answer to you. (Kathleen, 291)

"In my experience," he had said, "people can change, but most people don't." (Kathleen/Daniel, 313)

In a different world, she might have been more trusting and he might have been trustworthy. She got that. But...she would never understand why logic couldn't conquer something as simple and commonplace as love. (Maggie, 334) show less

Maine is a cleverly plotted and well paced story in which four women (a grandmother, her daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter) converge at their summer home in Maine just as certain critical family matters come to light. Once each character has their initial say and the story gets rolling, it is tough to put this one down.
Each woman's voice is unique and strong. The most plausible characters, and sometimes painfully so, are the daughter and her own daughter. Considerably more entertaining, but less plausible since they verge on caricature, are the daughter-in-law and grandmother. The daughter-in-law, whose life is so fastidiously built of straw, is ultimately almost superfluous and her presence diminishes toward the end.
The show more grandmother is fabulously and sometimes hilariously narcissistic, though Sullivan goes to some lengths to try to make this character's failings understandable. The fact that this ghastly uber-Catholic is the alpha and omega of the book is inevitable, but the centrality of this grotesque grandmother figure placed the book for me at least, less at Graham Greene's novel end of the spectrum and more toward the entertainment end, that is the masterfully entertaining end. show less

The backstory: After liking J. Courtney Sullivan's first novel, Commencement, I finally got around to reading her second novel, Maine.

The basics: Maine traces the story of the Kelleher family one summer at their Maine beachhouse. Four women share narration: Alice, the matriarch, whose husband Daniel, died ten years ago; Alice's daughter Kathleen, who lives with her boyfriend and runs a worm farm in California; Alice's daughter-in-law Anne Marie, who has become obsessed with dollhouses; and Kathleen's daughter Maggie, who is thirty-two, unmarried and pregnant.

My thoughts: In recent years I've realized how much I enjoy family sagas. I've always enjoyed multiple narrators, so Maine was right up my alley. I love the way Sullivan writes, show more and she's grew as a writer between Commencement and Maine. There's a maturity to Maine and its characters that I quite enjoyed. While Maine takes place over the span of a little over a month, the action is split equally between the present and explaining the family's history. In many cases, the four narrators had quite varied perspectives on the same events, which made the reader the most knowledgable person in the room. This technique can frustrate me to no end, but Sullivan does it well--the knowledge helped explain each character's perspectives and actions more thoroughly.

Sullivan's characters have interior monologues that kept me laughing out loud: ""What on earth would we talk about?” Arlo asked, as if most people interacted with their families for the riveting conversation." While it's expressed in humor in this passage, the theme of how, why, and when we spend time with family is a powerful theme in this novel.

Favorite passage: "The joy and spontaneity of summers past were gone now. Daniel’s death had ended them as a family. Each had pulled away from the others, and at some point without realizing it, Alice had gone from the matriarch—keeper of the wisdom and the order—to the old lady you had to look in on before the day’s fun could begin."

The verdict: Maine is not a book that made me wish I were vacationing at their Maine beach house alongside the Kelleher family, but I loved the day I spent with them. I kept changing my mind about which narrator or storyline was favorite, which is a testament to Sullivan's characters. show less

J. Courtney Sullivan's Maine follows four women in one family as they set off for a summer in Maine. But this is not a novel of beach merriment. Each of the women has her own issues--with herself, with the family, and with her role in life. Through a series of flashbacks and self inspections, each woman examines her past and what has brought her to her current situation. Each of them confronts her unhappiness while in Maine, and a family betrayal helps to frame the action of the summer.

While this novel wasn't exactly the "fun beach read" suggested by the cover and some of the blurbs, this was a good read. It's a deep family drama full of rich family history, secrets, doubts, and a dose of Catholic guilt. The stories of the 4 women are show more told in such a way that I found each of them to be very accesible. I know women who fit each of these types, so it was easy for me to feel a connection with these women. I will admit that the novel just sort of ended, which was a disappointment for me. But overall, I would recomend this novel to readers who enjoy the complicated family drama novels. show less

I really enjoyed this book, which centered on the relationships between three generations of women in a Boston Irish Catholic family. For the most part the characters rang true, several of them feeling familiar to this nice Jewish girl from the Midwest. The cover of this book makes it look like chick-lit, and it is not that at all. If I had just seen the cover I would likely have skipped over this book. Luckily I read the New York Times book review before seeing this on the shelf. The misleading cover, I think, accounts for many of the negative reviews. Many reviewers seemed to want nice characters and neat resolution rather than complex characters, and messiness. This is more Jonathan Franzen than Marian Keyes. If that appeals to you, show more I recommend this book unreservedly. I took off a star for a rushed ending, and for one primary character I thought was underwritten.

One note, I read this one and listened to the audio in the car, and absolutely recommend the audiobook. So often bad readers ruin books, but this reader was really excellent, and brought life to all the characters. show less