Fathers and Daughters

This novel--really a series of interlinking short stories--shows both why we keep searching for happiness and how difficult it is to achieve. The guy in the Times called it Flaubertian, and for once, I don't think the term was used irresponsibly. Markovits has a lyric eye for the everyday detail that brings description to life, making Fathers and Daughters every bit as thrilling as more obviously plot-driven books.

In this bittersweet tale of shrewd self defense, daughters must deal with illusive fatherly love, spouses must deal with the betrayal of their loved ones, and children must cope with the death of those that are most dear to them. In Fathers and Daughters, children suffer the consequences of their parents' mismatched and inequitable love, and mothers and fathers make selfish judgments about their lives and about their children. Structured around the four seasons, Fathers and Daughters contains four beautifully written and loosely connected stories that explore the boundaries of love, betrayal, commitment, and forgiveness. Cautionary and intimate, author Benjamin Markovits uses the collegiate setting, the civilized veneer of academia to weave an absolutely lovely tale of domestic life, involving danger, of secrets kept and revealed, and of desire and it's unforeseen consequences. Spring centers on Amy Bostik. Amy has just moved to New York from suburban New Jersey, a self-confessed "daddy's girl," she has just landed a job at a prestigious college and his anxious to make a good impression. Amy has also started dating Charles, a wealthy young lawyer at a prestigious firm in Manhattan, a gentleman of "aristocratic affability." Amy is initially swept away be the young man's charm, but the arrival of her family for Thanksgiving unleashes some new issues for her and she's torn between her loyalty for Charles and her love for her father, and her family. Amy has been given the preferences of love, the natural choice of affections, the darling of hearts, and the inheritor of her parents' dreams. This blessing forces her to ultimately question her budding love for Charles, because what counts for the family, what held it together runs" deeper than happiness." Meanwhile, it has become winter and Howard Peasbody, a teacher at Amy's college, is terribly unhappy. Whilst he begins to question his long-term relationship with Tomas, his German boyfriend, a woman suddenly visits him from the past. Apparently, he once fathered a child. Meeting his now grown daughter forces him not only to confront Tomas, but also to reevaluate his place in the world. With his air of patient irony, Howard has come to the point he can no longer hide the fact of his unhappiness, the profound depth of it. Perhaps then, the discovery of his new family might give him a second chance to make something other than solitude out of his life, living as he has "so deeply of his memories." Stuart Englander is Howard's teaching colleague. When Stuart learns that a friend has run off with a student of his, he also begins to question his own stultifying marriage, "a marriage that depended not only on shared tastes but on their ability to guess the discrepancies." Stuart starts to fantasize about Rachel Kranz, an attractive and wealthy young girl who is currently a student in his class. Spring seems to have awakened dormant desires within Stuart, and although Rachel is not that talented

The book isn't exclusively about fathers and daughters, but it's a major theme. Amy Bostick is a "daddy's girl" about to leave him and move to NYC to start a teacher's job. He comes to the city to visit her for Thanksgiving and meets her new boyfriend, Charles Conway, the rich son of a lawyer. They hit it off and play golf together, yet lose money to a man named Reuben Kranz, the partner of Conway's father, who will reappear later with his own daughter, Rachel, a 17-year-old beauty, caught in her parents' divorce and then faced with her father's death from a brain tumor. Her high school English teacher, Stuart Englander, falls in love with her, reminiscing about his first love with a girl her age and trying to rekindle it, with the tacit support of his barren wife. In the middle is the story of Howard Peasbody, another teacher, who receives a letter from his college girl friend who disappeared and had a child -- his, as it turns out. Peasbody is a gay man who lives with his lover, a young German, and once he meets his daughter, Francesca, he is so distraught that he breaks off relations with everyone. The stories of all these characters overlap, with Francesca and Rachel developing a friendship that is soldified over conversation about their fathers -- Rachel's is dying and Francesca's abandons her. There is a bittersweet quality to all the stories, they are tender and knowing with a keen understanding of family love, sexual desire and loss.

This book is titled "Either Side of Winter" in some other countries.

In four seasonal, connected stories, Markovitz dissects the internal lives of his four protagonists, connected by the threads of family, occupation and acquaintance, revealing the subtleties of complicated father-daughter relationships and the way people maneuver around private prejudices and selfish mistakes. Amy Bostick ("Fall") is in New York for a teaching position after four years of college; she feels that her father is sending her out to live the life he failed to experience; only forty-seven, he has begun a slide into middle age, with false teeth, thinning hair and a growing paunch. As her younger brother achieves his own belated successes, Amy senses her pride of place slipping, her life a footnote rather than the center of attention. When her family comes to New York for Thanksgiving, Amy anticipates sharing the old with the new, only to learn that expectations breed regret. When Howard Peasbody ("Winter") discovers he has a daughter by a woman from years before, he is astounded. Thoroughly gay, his younger lover ensconced at home, Howard thought only to meet this old flame and reminisce. As she speaks, Howard reassesses his response to her news, considering how he has manipulated facts to fit his take on the world, creating a comfort zone that is possibly unrealistic, "it occurred to him once more that he might be looking through a distorted lens". Practicing "the indifference of control", Howard reasserts his will, hoping to retreat from this potential vulnerability. His self-deception conceals an astonishing amount of self-destruction, his cold heart seeping like ice to separate him from his feelings. Stuart Englander ("Spring"), another teacher, has reached a plateau where everything is hopelessly banal but for his students, one in particular. Fascinated by the brown-haired Rachel Kranz, Stuart's early morning imagination is fixated involuntarily on her, his wife's bulk sleeping beside him. The marriage, retaining little animation, balances on intuition: "Childlessness had kept them childish". Occasional tears reduce Stuart to what is left of his "mineral bitterness", awakened by spring only to be confronted by his own failures. "Summer" features Rachel Kranz, the object of Stuart's desire, who has her own problems, caught in her parents' divorce, forming a self image that collapses with each new doubt. Coming to terms with a loss that will alter everything familiar, albeit troubling or distasteful, Rachel is desperate for comfort before being thrust into an indifferent world. Markovitz's characters are full of the slight, brittle judgments we all make but keep to ourselves and it is this poignancy that resonates through the stories, each season a revelation. Precisely drawn, revealing the barest slices of their lives, these people are exposed to the marrow, blindsided by their flaws: Given the choice "he wouldn't have chosen her. So this was the stuff he was made of." While these characters are, for the most part, unlikable, the