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Overview
On the day they first meet in a city playground, Deborah Laidlaw lends Toby Ruben a book called Trolley Girl, the memoir of a forgotten trolley strike in the 1920s, written by the sister of a fiery Jewish revolutionary who played an important, ultimately tragic role in the events. Young mothers with babies, Toby and Deborah become instant friends. It is a relationship that will endure for decades—through the vagaries of marriage, career, and child-rearing, through heated discussions of politics, ethics, and life—until an insurmountable argument takes the two women down divergent paths. But in the aftermath of crisis and sorrow, it is a borrowed book, long set aside and forgotten, that will unite Toby and Deborah once again.
Synopsis
On the first page of The Book Borrower, Toby Ruben and Deborah Laidlaw meet in a city playground where they are looking after their babies. Deborah lends Toby a book, Trolley Girl, a memoir about a 1920s trolley strike and three Jewish sisters, which will disappear and reappear throughout the twenty-two years these women are friends. Toby and Deborah raise children in the seventies while arguing over Patty Hearst and the meaning of life. They find work teaching inner-city day-care workers, a job that leads to conflict between them. Meanwhile, Toby reads the opening chapters of Trolley Girl with interest, but puts the book aside when its story turns tragic. Ten years later we find Toby and Deborah adjunct English instructors at a college. They are mothers of school-age children, stealing time to drink a beer, still deeply involved in their difficult friendship. The borrowed book has long since disappeared from Toby's consciousness. Another decade passes. Toby and Deborah spend a November afternoon hiking down a trail in the park. They never imagine that the outing will be their last together. In the final chapters of the novel, The Trolley Girl reemerges from Toby's dusty bookshelf and unexpectedly helps her come to terms with this agonizing loss.
Washington Post Book World
Extraordinary.
Editorials
New York Times Book Review
A charmer...one of those uncommon writers who are genuinely tickled by the ids and egos they commit to paper.New York Times
In deceptively quiet, guileless prose, she has described the mind numbing routine of child-care and the fraught, complex relations of men and women. Only Margaret Atwood (in Cat's Eye has written as knowingly about the frienship between women. Emotionally wrenching, beautifully realized work.New Yorker
This excellent novel weaves the story of a 1921 trolley strike...Mattison is concerned with the small decisions and coincidences that alter the course of our lives. Are they accidents, or impulses born of something deeper? Mattison's observations are so minutely compelling that each one feels like a shiny object, once lost but found unexpectedly.Wall Street Journal
An ambitious and original novel...The author's determination not to tie things up is refreshing.Washington Post Book World
Extraordinary.Publishers Weekly -
The pleasures, intimacies, tensions and failures of female friendship frame this subtle, psychologically rich novel, which chronicles the volatile relationship between two women and highlights issues of loyalty, sacrifice and guilt. In brisk, energetic prose, Mattison (Hilda and Pearl) investigates the prickly territory between affection and unconscious jealousy, avowals of devotion and secret betrayals, commitment and selfishness. On the day in 1975 when they meet in a Boynton, Mass., playground with their respective young children, Deborah Laidlaw loans Toby Ruben Trolley Girl, a book about a tragic trolley-car accident that occurred in the town in 1920. Ample, embracing, generous Deborah is a Catholic earth mother. Ruben (she thinks of herself only by her surname) is a harder person, Brooklyn-born, rough-edged, subconsciously resentful, Jewish. Despite their apparent incompatibility and Ruben's competitive streak, the two women sustain a deep attachment over two decades, interrupted twice when Ruben causes Deborah grief (and her job) by denigrating her teaching ability (a profession they both share). But an essential affinity always draws them back together, and they debate existential questions in a quirky sort of verbal shorthand, until the day when Deborah declares to Ruben: "You have a kindness defect,'' and admits she's frightened of Ruben's harsh assessment of herself and others. Suddenly, Deborah's death in an auto accident and the reappearance of the book Ruben borrowed long ago (passages from which have been interspersed in the narrative) connect. Trolley Girl's protagonist--an unrepentant anarchist who caused the deadly accident when she was young--turns out to be an elderly sculptor already entwined in Ruben's life. Through her, Ruben achieves insights into the insidious ways unconscious anger can undermine relationships. Mattison constructs her layered plot with the skill of a gem-setter, showing small facets of Ruben's growing understanding of her own failings as a friend and human being, and as she finally understands Deborah's legacy of tolerance and hope. Agent, Zoe Pagnamenta, Wylie. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
When Toby meets Deborah at the playground, they strike up a conversation about their children and become friends. Deborah lends Toby a book about a trolley strike in the 1920s, which she reads sporadically and then puts aside and forgets. Twenty years later, after Deborah is killed in a car crash, the devastated Toby discovers that sculptress Berry Cooper, who features prominently in the book, is living nearby. Prompted to rediscover the book, Toby finally finishes it, thus coming to terms with Deborah's death. The novel unfolds in jerky fits and starts at ten-year intervals, and the parallel story lines interweave, showing how the past is inextricably linked to the present. The characters are well drawn and realistic, the language and culture vivid. A worthwhile follow-up to Mattison's 1997 hit story collection, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling.--Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Watch Hill Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.John Freeman
{A} powerfully told story, likely to become for the Atlanta child murders what Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five became for the firebombing of Dresden... These Bones is a brave achievement.— Time Out: New York
Daphne Uviller
Alice Mattison is a pro at creating profound connections between unlikely people, places and now, even books...a serious, significant examination of the institution of friendship.— Time Out: New York