The Loved Ones
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A novel of a wealthy family in midcentury America and the flaws beneath the surface, from “a writer of dexterity and imagination.” (New York Times Book Review).
As the 1960s draw to a close, the Devlin family lead almost-perfect lives. Dashing father Nick is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and throws dinner parties while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are silently broken by the death of their little boy. As Nick’s older brother, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cutthroat world of the cosmetics industry, the Devlin family, fragmented by betrayals, will become victims of the cruelest kind of hurt.
“Mary-Beth Hughes's body of work casts a dreamy, hypnotic effect, even while slyly exposing the risks and rewards of love and its devastations among the upper class.”—Elle
“There’s a lot of smoking, bourbon, bangs and center parts. People have live-in help with whom they play bridge. But the book glosses these details lightly; to the extent it is a period piece, it is in the way it summons a now somewhat dated idea of luxury, ambition and, by extension, accomplishment… it amazes me how many of the book’s images have stayed with me.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Hughes is a quietly devastating writer, reminiscent of Evan S. Connell and James Salter in her delicate, almost surgical ability to peel back the thin skin of normal life and to lay bare our painful truths, contradictions, the stains of grief and betrayal…a beautiful, haunting novel.”—A.M. Homes
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Hughes (Wavemaker II) begins just before Christmas 1969: the snow is coming down fast when Jean Devlin pulls out of her driveway and pauses in the quiet hush of the storm in part because she can't see, but also to think and remember. The pages that follow set the tempo and sensibility for the rest of the novel, a patchwork of present and past, stitched together so seamlessly it can be unclear when one ends and another begins. This fluidity feels honestly captured and articulated, but a basic clarity is often sacrificed as a result. While Jean alludes to the pain of her past a dead son, a wayward husband, and a beloved but unruly brother she watches the snow and feels her solitude deepen. Hughes's novel is tender and sympathetic, but the cascade of familial references, and the snippets of memory that aren't fully explained or connected, never quite catch. As the book evolves and time moves along, through 1970 and into 1971, who, exactly, the characters are continues to feel too slippery, too subtle, too elusive. Despite the gorgeous precision of nearly every sentence (or perhaps because of it), the essential grounding of time and place feels obscured more often than not like something in a snowstorm that's right there but can't quite be distinguished.
