Volume 29, Number 19 · December 2, 1982
Surprises
By Ada Long
Grace Abounding
by Maureen Howard
Little, Brown, 175 pp., $13.95
Much in Grace Abounding is familiar from Maureen Howard's earlier books, both fictional and autobiographical. There is the family of ex-Catholics in Connecticut, where certainties of any kind—whether false or true—are harder to come by than in New York, the contrasting culture, where attitudes are a survival tactic. The family members themselves have parallels in past books: the mother, who is sensitive, self-dramatizing, and—although successfully or potentially professional—resistant to acknowledging her own competence, attracted more to the mysteries of memory and imagination than to the clearer demands of simple ambition; the father figure, usually a lawyer, orderly and out of reach; the grandmother, who is that 'doomed' creature, a 'lady'; a brother, vital and irresistible, but lost, in this case to grotesque mid-life change; and the child, beloved, elusive, and disappointing.
Review, 1572 words
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