The Peacock Feast

December 1, 2018
Two women, bonded by blood but more importantly by their experiences of crushing loss and retreat from life, find each other before it's too late.Synthesizing sensitive and soapy, Gornick's (Louisa Meets Bear, 2015, etc.) fourth novel--a chopped-up chronology of a scattered family line--features Prudence O'Connor, age 101 in the present time of this multiera saga, but only 4 on the day of the family tragedy that the novel slowly disinters. Events are set in motion when Grace, Prudence's previously unknown great-niece, turns up on the older woman's Manhattan doorstep, bearing mementos from the past and news about Prudence's brother, Randall, who quit the family for California when he was 14, some nine decades earlier. Prudence and Randall's Irish immigrant parents were servants in the lavish household of glass artist Louis C. Tiffany, and although both Prudence and Randall marry "up," Prudence never loses a sense of her humbler origins. Death visits the book's pages regularly--a parent's early demise; an abortion; a suicide; a fall into a ravine; a shooting; an execution. "What is the purpose of life?" asks Prudence, whose marriage to stiff, upper-class Carlton denies her children and who is too much "a coward of the heart" to grab happiness when it is offered. Randall, meanwhile, had a son, Leopold, the father to Grace and her twin brother, Garcia--another branch of the family tree marked by disappointment and pain. The deftness of Gornick's talent is visible in the hints and glimpses of the past that puncture the rather more rote accounts of the passing generations. The family secret, when finally revealed, is less a surprise than a confirmation of what has been suggested and tidily connects the foundational dots--class, cash, death, regret.Finely observed and ultimately redemptive, but the gloom and reticence are overwhelming in this old-fashioned, rather too visibly predetermined family drama.

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December 1, 2018
Although Prudence O'Connor lived in Louis C. Tiffany's Long Island mansion for a brief time as a young child, the events she witnessed one fateful afternoon would influence and, perhaps, sabotage everything she endured during her astonishing 101-year lifetime. The children of one of Tiffany's maids and gardeners, Prudence and her brother, Randall, were relocated to Tiffany's Manhattan mansion after Tiffany precipitously demolished the breakwater in front of his Oyster Bay estate. The mystery that shrouded their banishment may be solved when Prudence receives a visit from a heretofore-unknown grandniece in the final months of her life. Grace is the granddaughter of Prudence's brother, who fled to San Francisco as a teenager to escape their father's drunken rages. Now, with the living embodiment of past generations sitting before her, Prudence begins to fill in the gaps in her history, from Manhattan society to Paris caf�s to California's hippie communes. Delicately weaving Grace's present with Prudence's past, acclaimed novelist Gornick (Louisa Meets Bear, 2015) spins an appealing and enthralling family saga centered on notions of regret, remorse, and recrimination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Prudence O'Connor is born to Irish servants in 1914, at Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany's famed Long Island mansion. Her quiet life in a tumultuous century brings her into the orbit of many luminaries, including Louis and his daughter Dorothy, as well as Anna Freud, Dorothy's collaborator in psychoanalysis. Repressed memories are a major theme of the novel, and Prudence comes to terms with some hard truths near the end of her life. The story bounces around in time and place, also following the trajectory of Prudence's brother Randall, who flees the family home to San Francisco at age 14 and falls out of touch with Prudence a few years later. Randall's adult granddaughter tracks down Prudence in New York in 2013, and the two lonely women, who have spent much of their lifetimes pushing others away, forge a strong connection. VERDICT Spanning a century, two coasts, and two continents, this well-researched historical novel is moving and profound, laying bare the corrosive nature of secrets and regrets and the sadness of not living one's life to the fullest. [See Prepub Alert, 7/30/18.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY