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A Stone Boat

Name: A Stone Boat
Author: Andrew Solomon
ISBN: 9780571172405

by Andrew Solomon

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Overview

From Andrew Solomon, the acclaimed author of The Noonday Demon, comes an exquisitely perceptive story of family, sexuality, and the changes wrought by grief and loss.

Harry, an internationally celebrated concert pianist, arrives in Paris to confront his glamorous mother about his homosexuality. Instead, he discovers that she is terminally ill. In an attempt to escape his feelings of guilt and depression over the prospect of her death, he embarks on a series of intense love affairs -- one with a longtime female friend -- that force him to question his sexual identity. But as time runs out and tragedy looms closer, it is the relationship between Harry and his mother that emerges in all its stark simplicity and purity. Part eulogy and part confession, A Stone Boat is a luminous and moving evocation of the love between a son and his mother.

Harry, the narrator of Senior New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Solomon's first novel, is a young expatriate pianist. When Harry's mother is diagnosed with cancer, she blames her suffering on his homosexuality. Part elegy, part confession, above all an intense, vivid and moving exploration of a mother/son relationship.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Though he's a rising classical pianist recording his first CD, Harry is experiencing ``the saddest period of my life.'' His mother is dying of cancer and she blames her illness on his homosexuality. ``My mother wanted me to have a perfect life, more perfect even than hers,'' Harry, who's in his mid-20s, observes in his wish to be seen as both a good son and an independent man. What he's keeping secret from his mother, however, is that, inspired by his attraction to a female friend, he's becoming aware of his fundamental bisexuality. Solomon's prose is stylish, sometimes beautiful, but it suffers from a vagueness that hovers about the relationships it describes (``When something saddened me, she came and joined me in my pain,'' says Harry of his mother). The characters live in a world of upper-class homes and hotels in Paris, London and Manhattan, with weekends in country homes and maids and chauffeurs at their disposal, a backdrop of privilege that sometimes edges into preciousness (``I associate my mother's entire illness with cut flowers,'' Harry notes). Yet the contrast between the idyllic existence money can buy and the inexorable ugliness of death is poignantly obvious. Harry's struggle to cope with his parent's impending death is observed with passion and conviction. Solomon (The Ivory Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost), a senior writer for the New York Times Magazine, shows great promise in his fiction debut. (Oct.)