Laura

"In our rented house my bedroom was right over the kitchen, the room where my parents and their partying friends always ended up ... So why, if I could sleep through that commotion, would someone's silence wake me? When I opened my eyes she was standing in front of my window, gazing out toward the pond. She was smoking a cigarette, and as she exhaled, the smoke billowed through the screen so it looked as though the night were steaming right outside the window."From the moment eleven-year-old Paul Finley meets Laura Coe Pettit, he is besotted. The mesmerising young poet will capture his heart and haunt his soul forever. Over the following years, as the awkward adolescent grows into manhood, his life becomes entwined with the enigmatic older woman as their worlds collide and the novel builds towards its inevitable, shattering climax.Larry Watson has written a rich, beautifully crafted story about an obsessive and enduring love that lingers long after the final sentence. Some readers might find Laura a cold, unlikeable character but her selfish-at-times, abrasive attitude is needed to balance out the softer, sensitive Paul who would otherwise be too weak and wimpish. I had never read Larry Watson until I picked up a copy of Laura on impulse. I was drawn by the seductive cover, the back-page blurb got my curiosity, and I was hooked from page one. I really did find it unputdownable!Kelvin MacGregor

I am bit biased toward Larry Watson and his work, too. This novel is a real change from his Montana based stories, and I was skeptical at first. I wondered how he could place himself within an eleven year old boy who comes from Boston.... but I need not have worried for long. As usual, this is a beautifully written, lyrical piece that is almost poetic in its beauty. The trouble I had with it, though, is that neither Paul nor Laura was a very sympathetic character. By the end of the book I had the feeling that I had been cheated in a way, for I felt that there had to have been something to redeem Paul and his horrendous obsession with Laura.... Laura having Alzheimers is just, I think. Serves her right, is what I really think. I do not remember a character so thoroughly unlikeable in recent fiction as Laura Coe Pettit. Maybe I just too strongly relate to the characters of Martha and Catherine. In any rate, this is a beautifully written story and I am recommending it to anyone who loves finely wrought tale.

I admit, I'm a little biased when it comes to Larry Watson (he was one of my professors at the University Of Stevens Point in Wisconsin). However, this book has a wonderful grace about it, by any standard. It engulfs you and touches deep. The longing - the despair - the naive magic of youth. It's a book which makes time stop (as the best books do). My words do not describe the experience well enough. For it is the experience of reading Larry Watson - letting your mind live through his characters. Laura is truly a great book.

OK, so you read the other reviews. Larry Watson moves from the West to a story that begins in New Hampshire. Laura is a tour of growing up of a young man from 1950's onward. Paul is at once romantic and pragmatic. He is the unsatisfied, incomplete without his dream. A life of shoulds and shouldn'ts. The conventional vrs. the forbidden. I am torn between wanting Watson to write more about the plains of Montana and wanting him to write another book like this. In many ways, he has moved from a regional writer in the same manner as when John Updike began writing about New England instead of his boyhood home in Pennsylvania. Paul Finley came of age in the book, but so did Larry Watson. I literally could not put the book down. Watson's talent for storytelling is at his best. Laura is the poet but Watson uses very poetic language in the book. The flow and continuity of the book is excellent.

What I've always liked about Larry Watson's books was the terse writing, the feel of the west, and the complete immersion into the world of masculinity, which is a foreign land for me. So I was a bit afraid of how I would feel about this book, which looked to me to be leaning towards a mingling of feminine outlook with what I had come to appreciate most about Watson's writing, and I feared that it would dilute my awe for his work.This book was amazing. Paul spends a lifetime with an obsession with Laura, and like all obsessions, finds it rooted in complete mystery over who she really is, and what it is about her that so captivates him. Watson never let me down, he remained steadfast to the view of the world seen through eyes of men, which remains for me as enigmatic as Laura does for Paul. He gives me a glimpse into a world I've never lived, that of a boy who grows into a man, and anchors it with touches of a world I know firsthand and yet still evades complete understanding, that shadow world of relationships between men and women. The relationship between Paul and Laura haunts both of them throughout their lives. Like most people, I too have had relationships that I will ponder over during late sleepless nights. I think Larry Watson did a remarkable job in capturing the combination of anticipation and memory that keeps us awake because of our own obsessions.