The Truth of the Matter: A Novel

Nobody writes about family life as insightfully as Robb Forman Dew. She understands how young men and women sail blindly into marriage and, for better or worse, become their true, adult selves as the joys, griefs, and often numbing everydayness of family life take hold and eventually deposit them on the far end of middle age. Her most recent novel, The Truth of the Matter, takes up the life of Agnes Scofield, whom the reader met as a girl and came to know as a young wife in The Evidence Against Her, the first book of this family trilogy. As the novel opens, we see Agnes in an intimate conversation with her husband, Warren, only to learn at the end of the scene that it is a memory-Warren died in a car accident years before, leaving her with limited resources to raise their young family alone. Now Agnes's sons are grown and going off to World War II, her daughter is doing war work in Washington, D.C. and Agnes finds herself, in her forties, contemplating the rest of her life. Like all Dew's best female characters, she has unfailingly done the right thing, nurturing and caring for her children, all the while battling her own passionate nature in a world that would like women to just be, well, quiet. Agnes is decidedly not that-and one of the things I love most about this book is the way, returning home at the end of the war, her children are often deliciously shocked by how real she has turned out to be. Anyone who's grown into middle age herself will appreciate Dew's wondrous depiction of the evolution of a human soul. Observing Agnes fulfill the promise of her youth in ways that are at the same time surprising and utterly believable, readers will recognize the wonderful strangeness of their own human journeys.

Robb Forman Dew won the National Book Award for Dale Loves Sophie to Death. The Truth of the Matter begins in 1928, with young married couple, Warren and Agnes Scofield, living in Washburn, Ohio. Warren Scofield works for the family business, Scofields and Company, manufacturing engines. Agnes and Warren seem to have an idyllic marriage, but Agnes often has to deal with Warren's bleak moods. On a drear winter day in 1930, Warren leaves on a business trip with his uncle. Their car skids on ice and hits a tree, and they are both killed instantly. Agnes is left with her four children: Claytor and Dwight (actually her younger brother who was left with her by her father when her mother died of flu) ages 10 and 11; Betts, age 6 and Howard, barely 3. She discovers that the business was in trouble, and she has little money. Agnes must keep the house together, get the children through college, and she finds herself resenting the way the children have only fond memories of their absent father, and seem to resent her hard work. She suspects that Warren hit the tree intentionally. Agnes begins teaching at the local elementary school. Her brother-in-law Robert and his wife Lily, who live next door, are a big help. World War II changes everything for the Scofields as Dwight, Claytor and Howard enlist and Betts gets a job in Washington. Agnes' life alone without her children takes on a dreamlike quality. The children return home at the end of the war in the summer of 1948 with spouses, children and friends; and then they settle in. The children's war experiences have changed them, and Agnes feels as if she hardly knows them. She knows she loves them, but they often seem to resent her, or take her for granted. The book ends in the summer of 1950, when Agnes, Lily, and their granddaughters Mary Alcorn and Amelia take a magical trip to the Scofield's Maine cottage. Armchair Interviews says: The Truth of the Matter is a warm and wonderful saga of a woman and how she handles life's myriad challenges in her relationships with her extended family and friends, and her search for happiness.

This is a very fine, fully realized novel about the changing roles of a woman within her family over the course of a lifetime. It's also one of the few contemporary books I know of that takes the life of an "ordinary" woman as a serious subject of investigation and reflection, and makes it clear that there are no ordinary people. The author has great authority and seems perfectly comfortable assuming it, and the result is a book that will embrace an intelligent reader from the first page to the last. This isn't formulaic fiction, this is a work of art, and the characters are not always admirable, but each one is sympathetic in his humanity. In my opinion this is the best book of the year, and one of the best books I've read in years. It's right up there with the books I keep apart to read and reread: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Fitzgrald, Faulkner, Cheever, Updike, Philip Roth, Anne Tyler, Marilyn Robinson,and a few bookshelves worth of others. If you are a lover of fine fiction then I can't recommend this book more highly.

I have long been a fan of Dew's work ever since the incredible "Dale Loves Sophie To Death." This novel is so subtle, so particularly brilliant in detail, and so nuanced in character, that it is just a revelation. Here, time is fluid, the past is always just under the present, ready to sneak up on you, and Agnes Scofield begins to come to terms with it, even as her household enlarges with wives, kids and spouses. Complex, brave, and gorgeously written, I think this novel is nothing short of a masterpiece.

I was deeply moved by the universl truths I discovered in this book that I had never really heard talked about before: the way a family forms and grows and changes, the different roles that each stage of life within a family requires. No one writes this way about women in any fiction that is considered important except Ann Tyler's serious books. So few writers seem to consider family life particularly important, and yet everybody is shaped by their own family. This book is really very funny, too, at times,and I think the author is exploring those things that shape our lives, and that we hardly ever notice, but which are ridiculous when taken out of context. I haven't read the first book about this family, but I'm going to give it to myself for Christmas. I have only read The Family Heart by Robb Foreman Dew, which is non-fiction, but this book is wonderful, and I felt as though I knew these people so well and as if I was living their lives during the time I was reading this book.