From Amazon.com
The Sabbathday River explores a rushing stream of themes, beginning with the breaking of several of the Ten Commandments and touching on loss, faith, gender politics, and motherhood as it illuminates the darkness of an unthinkable crime. Naomi Roth--divorced, liberal, feminist, and Jewish--is very much an outsider in Goddard, New Hampshire, though she's lived there for nine years and manages a crafts cooperative that employs many local women. When Naomi finds the body of a murdered newborn floating in the river, the town's normal atmosphere of suspicion intensifies as gossip begins to swirl around its Jezebel, Heather Pratt, who has previously borne a child by a married man. The district attorney extracts a tainted confession from Heather that she gave birth to a new baby by her now-estranged lover and left it for dead. Meanwhile, Naomi finds a second dead newborn in a pond, leading to a charge of not one murder but two--though Heather insists that she had only one baby and that it was stillborn. A furious Naomi convinces Judith Newman, a fellow New Yorker and lawyer new to Goddard, to take on Heather's defense.
Though the prosecution's case is exceedingly farfetched and the D.A. clumsily duplicitous, local sentiment runs deeply against Heather, whose apathy and refusal to face reality annoy even her few supporters. What's more, the case becomes a political football when news organizations and a radical feminist group converge on the town, eager to turn Heather into a symbol of oppression. Judith mounts an impressively cohesive defense, yet in the end help comes from an unexpected source.
After the protracted courtroom drama, the essential puzzle still remains: Whose is the second baby? Oddly, Jean Hanff Korelitz telegraphs the surprise ending disappointingly early, deflating the denouement somewhat. Yet the characters at the book's core--intelligent, analytical, argumentative--and their personal dramas are intriguing enough to overshadow the small faults of plot, making The Sabbathday River a rewarding, if longish, literary mystery. --Barrie Trinkle
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Publishers Weekly
When Naomi Roth pulls the body of a stabbed infant girl from the Sabbathday River, she precipitates an investigation that devastates the small New Hampshire town she hoped to save. Smart and engrossing, this thriller addresses the complex morality behind its characters' behavior with gravity and deep humanity. Idealistic Vista volunteer and New York Jewish liberal in search of a cause, Naomi turns local crafts into a booming catalogue business by the mid-'80s but never quite fits into the tightly knit New England community whose secrets unravel as townsfolk point fingers?mostly at Heather Pratt, the proud and lonely girl who delicately embroiders traditional samplers and unapologetically bears the illegitimate child of a married man. Naomi sees little of the sisterhood she preaches among Heather's co-workers and neighbors, excepting only recent arrival Judith Friedman, a fellow Jewish New Yorker who befriends Naomi and defends the modern-day Hester in court. It turns out, however, that even Judith has her secrets. Korelitz (A Jury of Her Peers) traces the evolution of '60s idealism to '80s self-absorption, feminist vision to emotional chaos, religious devotion to moral decay. After the trial's dramatic climax, the reader is left with disturbing insights into the roots and ramifications of infanticide. Korelitz securely navigates the scientific shoals surrounding the crime. Her rich, often lyrical language occasionally becomes fussy but in general serves her well in conveying local color and atmosphere and in describing the moments of passion and betrayal in this compelling study of modern women with old-fashioned desires. 100,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB main selections; rights sold in Germany and Italy. (Apr.) FYI: Korelitz is married to poet Karl Muldoon.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
