Gloria

Anne Tolstoi Wallach

Gloria plunges us into the 1950's women's world...so truly that those who were there will be amazed they survived and everyone else will know why the Sixties had to happen.

Boston Sunday Globe

[Gloria] succeeds in prompting reflection on the nature of authenticity in a culture that easily surrenders to stereotypes and sound bites.

Cecilia Holland

Like a mating of Proust and Cosmopolitan...from its superwoman heroine...to the wild exuberance of its story—I loved it!

Eden Robinson

Like a mating of Proust and Cosmopolitan...from its superwoman heroine to the wild exuberance of its story—I loved it!

Marie Claire

This beautifully detailed novel...is an enormously entertaining read.

Marion Meade

A tour de force—ambitiously conceived, vividly imagined, stylistically elegant...I found myself riveted from the first page to the last.

New York Times Book Review

[Maillard] succeeds in building a gilded, crinoline-draped labyrinth...watching his lithe, artful protagonist wiggle and reason her way to freedom.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gloria Merriman Cotter is a smart upper-class girl caught in the restrictive social mores of late 1950s America and torn between conformity and self-realization. Maillard (Light in the Company of Women) tenderly and meticulously charts his heroine's struggle to alternately fit in, stand out and not disappoint anybody, least of all herself. Gloria spends her last summer at home, between college and graduate school, when she returns to the country club crowd of Raysburg, a small West Virginia steel town. The daughter of a self-made executive and a misplaced New England society matron, Gloria knows she's expected to marry the right sort of man. Does that mean that her dream of grad school at Columbia University to study poetry with Lionel Trilling is doomed? With insight and clarity, Maillard illuminates the confused, complex, sometimes trivial but always heartfelt thoughts of a young woman trying to fathom her place in the world. Traumatized by cruel classmates at boarding school, Gloria begins high school desperate to appear "normal," an enterprise guided by the voice in her head that she calls "secret watcher." Doggedly, she remakes herself, skillfully plotting her rise to cheerleader and then prom queen. She feels like an impostor, however, because under her carefully crafted disguise of crinolines and curled eyelashes, Gloria is a brilliant, intellectual bookworm. At Briarville College, she is torn between her sorority's finicky rules and her desire to be taken seriously as a poetry scholar. Maillard's precise prose weaves the long, meandering story together admirably, though the details, particularly of her fashion dilemmas, can be monotonous. Yet most of the subplots, notably the passage of Gloria's parents into midlife, propel the story and give context for Gloria's journey. After following Gloria through her tough coming-of-age, readers will wonder what happens to this resourceful but consummate good girl, in her high heels, girdle and kid gloves, when she enters Columbia on the cusp of the '60s. Major ad/promo. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this full-bodied epic about one young woman, American novelist Maillard (Hazard Zone), who now lives in Canada, captures a period in our past while exploring various facets of love and friendship and the constraints of class and social convention. At 21, beautiful country-club girl Gloria Merriman Cotter is a sorority president, campus May Queen, and Phi Beta Kappa student, but deep inside she considers herself an unattractive imposter. During the interminable summer after her graduation in 1957, she swims laps obsessively, drinks too much, and fends off increasingly dangerous advances from her father's old war buddy while she's at home in Raysburg, WV, with her steel company executive father and socialite mother. Missing her dearest college friend, majorette Susie Steibel, who's newly married, and her mentor and adviser, British literature professor Bolton, Gloria considers whether to marry her socially acceptable fianc --who's sexually, if not intellectually, satisfying--or go to graduate school to do what she loves. Maillard invites comparison to John O'Hara for the time and place of this novel and its well-conceived characters and fluent narration; Gloria could be the breakthrough book for this deserving author. [The novel was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award.--Ed.]--Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Kirkus Reviews

The West Virginia-born Maillard (now a resident of Vancouver) wraps up a trilogy (Light in the Company of Women, 1994; Hazard Zones, 1996) with the kind of big, stubbornly old-fashioned narrative that was a publisher's bread-and-butter in the 1940s and '50s. Set in 1957 in Raysburg, West Virginia, the narrative follows 21-year-old Gloria, daughter of steel-company executive Ted Cotter and his society-matron wife Laney. On the surface, Gloria is a product of her indulged upbringing: prom queen, fashion plate, and country-club deb. But just as the heady swim of martinis, pool parties, and golf matches barely conceals the class divisions and sexual ambiguities underneath, so, too, Gloria is not quite what she seems. The party girl exterior masks a determined, ambitious intellect. Encouraged by her college advisor, Gloria has been accepted for graduate study in English at Columbia, an achievement not met with wholehearted approval by her family. Over the summer, Gloria must wrestle with the question of what kind of woman she wants to be. Does she marry her beau, a handsome, unimaginative frat boy? Or does she immerse herself in a serious study of poets like Eliot, Pound, and Auden? Her final decision isn't nearly as important as the journey she takes to get there. Neither is it as obvious as it might appear: Maillard makes us see the attraction of both worlds, as well as the alcoholism, infidelity, and misogyny that belie the outward complacency of the period. Gloria battles with her mother, reevaluates her formerly close relationship with her father and, in the story's only unconvincing lapse into melodrama, fends off the crude predations of one of herfather'scolleagues. In this long, leisurely (and occasionally meandering) novel, which contains not a trace of PoMo irony, Maillard does a remarkable job of examining his characters and their place in 1950s suburban American with a breadth and depth that, at its best, recalls Balzac or George Eliot. A meticulously observed, immensely satisfying finale.