by Elizabeth Hay
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by Lawrence Hill
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by Muriel Barbery
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by Annabel Lyon
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by Linden MacIntyre
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Product Description
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Garbo Laughs, Elizabeth Hay's second novel following her Giller-nominated A Student of Weather, opens with a question that has caused debate and dissension for decades: who's better, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando? While her son Kenny favours Frankie, Harriet likes Brando, and she has the last word. "He's a better actor," she tells him. "He's better looking. Which isn't to say I don't like Frank Sinatra. I do. At least, I like the young Frank Sinatra when he looked like Glenn Gould. He was an awful thug when he got older." This is no idle matter for Harriet. She may live in Ottawa with her two adolescent children, her good-hearted husband Lew, and her moribund writing career, but her true home is in the celluloid world that belongs to Brando, Garbo, and her beloved Buster Keaton. It's often more real to her than that other, more modest world, in which life-changing events are not accompanied by an orchestra's swells. As her husband laments, "Movies... that's all she cares about." Nevertheless Harriet is often distracted from her cinematic pursuits--which include writing letters to legendary critic Pauline Kael--by the friends and neighbours who enmesh her in their minor traumas and major tragedies. The more Harriet tries to retreat into the safety of flickering lights, the less she is able to cope with the crises that threaten her own marriage. "I've seen a thousand movies," Harriet writes in another unsent letter to Kael, "but I'm still no good at love."
If Garbo Laughs were a movie, it would be one of the low-key, drolly humorous yet essentially melancholy films of Scottish director Bill Forsythe. (Unsurprisingly, Harriet is a fan of Forsythe's wonderful Local Hero.) Though Hay's book may sometimes seem overly meandering, it ultimately needs the generous running time. That's because Harriet's story is less about the dramatic conflicts that fuel Hollywood's fantasies than the steady accretion of subtle details, emotional nuances, and little moments when "we make our confessions to the wrong person, and the bonds that we have no intention of forming get formed." --Jason Anderson
From Publishers Weekly
Garbo hardly ever laughed, and when she did, it was dubbed; reality is similarly transformed in this quirky, dreamy novel infused with movie mania. A plague of cinematic absorption settles over an Ottawa neighborhood in Hay's latest offering (her debut, A Student of Weather, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize). Harriet Browning's ascetic mother refused her the frivolity of the cinema as a child, and as an adult she views films obsessively. In middle age, she is the center of a small group of cinephiles: her son, Kenny, obsessed with Sinatra, watches classic movies to forget his troubles at school; her daughter, Jane, on the brink of adolescence, longs for the glamorous life; her neighbor and friend Dinah may be attracted mainly by the familial activity of watching together. Lew, Harriet's realist husband, is left out of this loop; his escapes come in the form of business trips to South America. The arrival of Harriet's aunt Leah, the trouble-making widow of a Hollywood screenwriter, and her stepson Jack, a lazy, fast-talking writer, leads to shifts in affections and allegiances. It is illness, however, that brings an end to the movie-watching, in true Hollywood weepy fashion. References to Pauline Kael (beloved by Harriet), top 100 movie lists and a lineup of movie greats (Marlon Brando, Sean Connery and Bette Davis are among the favorites) are as integral to the story as the interactions of its film-besotted protagonists. This is a gracefully written novel, mapping out the patterns of tension and release in a family whose members are best able to express their love and disappointment through the films of the past.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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