Overview
"The cost squeeze that drove a third of Vermont's farms out of business in the last decade has brought tragedy to the Owens River Valley. Authorities now believe the gunshot wound that killed Vernon Nowle, 67, of Worthing, last Saturday, was self-inflicted. 'All indications point to suicide,' said a spokesman for the Vermont State Police." To the newspaper, the story was simple. To Nowle's daughter Vincie, the death was not simple at all. After a decade of urban life and an increasingly suffocating marriage, Vincie returns to her small hometown, where a reunion of grief quickly becomes complicated. Along with her brothers, the charming salesman Chad and the solid-as-a-rock biology teacher Darrell, Vincie navigates an emotional house of mirrors in which the familial signposts of identity and loyalty, love and deception, create a maze of intrigue - and force Vincie to confront her own reflection.The author of the highly acclaimed novel Alma Rose presents a beautifully crafted novel about a woman's awakening. Set in a rapidly changing Vermont farming town, Nowle's Passing masterfully portrays the culture of a region and the stoic and subtle beauty of its people.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Returning to her Vermont hometown, self-doubting grad-school dropout Vincie Nowle probes the suspicious circumstances of her father's apparent suicide even as she faces up to her disintegrating marriage.While Forbes's gracefully written second novel (after Alma Rose) has elements of a murder mystery, its real drama lies in the way the author creates complex characters, and in how she meticulously dissects and charts the chambers of the human heart. Both of Vincie's brothers-smooth-talking Chad, a millionaire marketing consultant, and stoic Darrell, a biology teacher-are suspects in the death. As the truth about their father's passing emerges, the three siblings vent pent-up resentments, anger, secrets, jealousies and misunderstandings. Vincie's consequent emotional liberation helps her to break free of her insufferable husband, a snobbish, condescending and cruel professor of literature. Here, as in Alma Rose, Forbes employs exquisitely precise language to tell a hopeful story of one woman's emergence from a self-made cocoon. Author tour. (Mar.)Library Journal
The suicide of Vermont dairy farmer Vernon Nowle stuns his small-town neighbors. His children gather from Washington, D.C., New York, and nearby Worthing to bury their father and to try to make sense of his seemingly senseless death. Vincie, the eldest, is disturbed by the police report that Nowle's dogs had been shut up in the house for two days before the oil delivery man found her father's body. The care and humane treatment of animals was an integral part of Nowle's life, and it seemed unlikely that he would forget the dogs, even when contemplating suicide. If not suicide, was it then murder? In discovering the truth, Vincie discovers herself. This powerful novel, Forbes's second, is engaging, agonizing, and beautifully written. Recommended for most collections.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., ProvidenceKirkus Reviews
In a skillfully done second novel, Forbes (Alma Rose, 1993) again displays a gift for the critical detail, elegant description, and quiet yet evocative character portrayal.The three thirtysomething Nowle children reunite in Worthing, the picturesque Vermont farm town of their childhood, under the worst of all possible circumstances, their father Vernon having died suddenly, an apparent suicide. But when only daughter and eldest child Vincie—arriving at the farmhouse with her pompous, domineering husband Gifford—learns that Vernon was found slumped over the kitchen table, his dogs locked in the house with him, she becomes immediately suspicious: Her father was a man for whom animals always came first, and though she finds his suicide unlikely, the idea of his allowing his dogs to suffer is inconceivable. Her brothers—biology teacher Darrell, a carbon copy of his strong, silent father, and the dashing city-slicker Chad—claim to agree, but the only suspects that investigating officer Bret Leroux (a former classmate of Vincie's) seems interested in are the Nowle children themselves. When Vincie learns that her father had been in the process of (but had not yet completed) making plans to turn his land over to conservationists, the plot thickens, a motive for murder appears, and Gifford, as well as Darrell's wife Georgeanne, must also be considered suspects. Meanwhile, as Vincie struggles to solve the mystery of her father's death, she enters into several simultaneous quests: to uncover the circumstances of her mother Phoebe's fatal tractor accident 19 months earlier; to determine if her own marriage is indeed the prison it seems; to get to know her brothers (for really the first time) as adults; and to find—after a lifetime of running away from roots, family, and ambition—her essential self.
A story, like a timeles New England landscape, that lingers in the best possible way.