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Overview
Diana stands before the mirror preening with her best friend, Maureen. Suddenly, a classmate enters holding a gun, and Diana sees her life dance before her eyes. In a moment the future she was just imagining—a doting wife and mother at the age of forty—is sealed by a horrific decision she is forced to make. In prose infused with the dramatically feminine sensuality of spring, we experience seventeen-year-old Diana's uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity. Together with the sights and sounds of renewal, we experience the tasks of Diana's adulthood: protecting her beloved daughter and holding onto her successful husband.
An acclaimed writer and poet, Laura Kasischke has crafted a consciousness that encompasses the truth of a teenager's world and the profound transformation of that world at midlife. Resonant and deeply stirring, The Life Before Her Eyes finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare from long ago that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring.
Synopsis
Diana stands before the mirror preening with her best friend, Maureen. Suddenly, a classmate enters holding a gun, and Diana sees her life dance before her eyes. In a moment the future she was just imagining—a doting wife and mother at the age of forty—is sealed by a horrific decision she is forced to make. In prose infused with the dramatically feminine sensuality of spring, we experience seventeen-year-old Diana's uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity. Together with the sights and sounds of renewal, we experience the tasks of Diana's adulthood: protecting her beloved daughter and holding onto her successful husband.
An acclaimed writer and poet, Laura Kasischke has crafted a consciousness that encompasses the truth of a teenager's world and the profound transformation of that world at midlife. Resonant and deeply stirring, The Life Before Her Eyes finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare from long ago that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring.
author of The Boys of My Youth - Jo Ann Beard
The intensity of The Life Before Her Eyes is both enhanced and leavened by Kasischke's masterful and stunning use of imagery; she is as much poet as novelist, and the melding of the two has produced a work of dark and lyrical beauty.
Editorials
Jo Ann Beard
The intensity of The Life Before Her Eyes is both enhanced and leavened by Kasischke's masterful and stunning use of imagery; she is as much poet as novelist, and the melding of the two has produced a work of dark and lyrical beauty.—author of The Boys of My Youth
Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed poet Kasischke applies her lyrical skills to fiction in this double portrait of Diana McPhee as 40-year-old wife and mother and 17-year-old girl. As in her earlier novels (White Bird in a Blizzard and Suspicious River), here Kasischke's precise imagery and the languid, dreamy pace capture the poignancy and sluggish awakening of late adolescence, though they are at odds with the harsh tale that unfolds. Blond Diana and dark Maureen, regarding their images in the high school bathroom mirror, jolt from their teenage dreams at the sound of gunfire. Their attacker is fellow student Michael Patrick, who laughs as he delivers a horrible ultimatum: one girl will live and one will die; each has a moment to choose. Maureen offers herself, and the sacrifice is accepted or so it seems. As the past begins to contaminate Diana's safe suburban life with her beautiful daughter and loving husband, it becomes clear that this future is the result of her imagination constructing a life she may never live in the moments before Patrick releases the safety on his gun. Kasischke is at her best writing about young women urgently sexual, childishly careless. This song of innocence and of experience reads like a fairy tale gone drastically wrong, the sensibility heightened by Kasischke's emphasis on language. Despite the poignancy of the central moral conflict (her or me?), its resolution is made secondary to the novel's stylistic imperatives and, as a result, the story loses much of its power. Still, it will please readers who were mesmerized by The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and other tales of teenage reverie. 10-city author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.KLIATT
Diana sees herself at 40 as content: happily married to a markedly older philosophy professor, mother to a daughter named Emma, spending her days sketching in her studio. She lives in the town of her childhood, but under improved economic and social circumstances: her husband is celebrated in his field; her daughter attends a local private girls' school. The few troubles in Diana's almost-middle-aged life are the recent death of her cat Timmy, whom she acquired when she was a teenager, and a growing distractedness mingled with intense headaches. Kasischke gives readers a perfectly formed mature woman, right on the heels of a prologue in which teenaged girlfriends are confronted by an armed classmate who demands they tell him which of them he should kill. In a Solomonic passage, one girl directs the gunman to herself, while the other points him toward her friend. How would a girl live with that sort of guilt, the knowledge that her friend sacrificed her own life while the one who lived told the killer to take her friend's life rather than her own? But, it turns out, as the narrative weaves back and forth between the daily lives of the girls before the shooting and Diana's idyllic maturity, this isn't the drama of the story after all. The drama is even more intense than the half-life of a murdered friendship: Diana's maturity, the reader finally learns, is the flight of the teenager's imagination in the moment after she, too, is shot. "The life before her eyes" has flashed ahead as well as back. Kasischke paces her story with a precision that carries the reader ahead, in spite of backward glances at girlish trysts and eating binges. Highly recommended for high school girls and women whoonce were. KLIATT Codes: SA*—Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Harcourt, Harvest, 280p.,— Francisca Goldsmith