"Opening in the first decades of the 20th century, this luminous and tender novel follows, for most of its stately length, the interwoven lives of two married couples in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio. One half of the first of these couples is Cal Jenkins, the sweet-tempered son of a traumatised first world war veteran, born in the spring of 1920 with (to use the parlance of the era) a mild deformity:"
"The day you were born and one of your legs came up short, his father, Everett, tells him, right then I thought, well, that's it. If we get into another big one, he'll never be in it. The delights of prolepsis! The US gets into another big one in quite short order, of course. Cal, just as his father predicted, is turned away from the recruitment office and ends up spending his days in drudgery at the local concrete factory instead."
The story opens in the early 20th century and follows the interwoven lives of two married couples in Bonhomie, Ohio. Cal Jenkins, born in 1920 with one leg shorter and raised by a traumatised World War I veteran, is turned away from military recruitment and spends his days at the local concrete factory. A chance meeting with Becky Hanover, a whimsical young woman with a dark bob, leads to a swift marriage that anchors decades of domestic life. The account traces ordinary rhythms—work, marriage, parenting—and major national events as they reshape small-town existence across roughly fifty years, with a luminous, tender tone.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]