Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Travel & Transportation - Fiction

There Is Room For You

Name: There Is Room For You
Author: Charlotte Bacon
ISBN: 9780312423841

by Charlotte Bacon

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Overview

"A richly endowed memory piece...Bacon is a seductive and gifted storyteller."—Maureen Howard, author of A Lover's Almanac

Anna Singer, a charmingly independent young New Yorker, feels derailed after losing her father to a car accident and her husband to a younger woman. She books a trip to India, hoping that there she will be able to put her grief into perspective. Though this is her first visit, India has always tantalized her: her English mother, Rose, was raised in Calcutta during the twilight of the British Raj, but seldom spoke of her childhood. Then, as Anna departs, Rose gives her a manuscript in which she has recorded her Indian memories, torn between two cultures and belonging completely to neither.

Synopsis

"A richly endowed memory piece...Bacon is a seductive and gifted storyteller."—Maureen Howard, author of A Lover's Almanac

"Readable and sophisticated...it makes us want to stay, indeed, unable to turn away from the ultimate fate of this vulnerable family unsure of just how and where they fit together, but about to discover the way." —Christine Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Intelligent, richly atmospheric...unconventional glimpses of India past and present sit vividly side by side with reflections on politics, perception and racial identity."—Publisher Weekly

"Engaging...a subtle bildungsroman."—The Washington Post Book World

"Bacon has woven an insightful mother-daughter saga into her depiction of the complexity that is India, creating a satisfying amalgam of past and present."—Booklist

Charlotte Bacon is the author of Lost Geography, and the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning story collection A Private State. She teaches at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

The Washington Post - Pankaj Mishra

Rose's memories bring to Bacon's novel an intensity that Anna's travel-writing persona only sporadically achieves. As she uncovers Rose's past and stumbles upon its best-kept secrets, Anna's pronouncements on her American life and Indian experience gain coherence. She not only develops a new understanding of her unsettlingly lonely mother, she is also able to enter, and amplify, Rose's sense of having been part of "something grand yet real in India."

About the Author, Charlotte Bacon

Charlotte Bacon is the author of Lost Geography, and the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning story collection A Private State. She teaches at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Intelligent, richly atmospheric...unconventional glimpses of India past and present sit vividly side by side with reflections on politics, perception and racial identity."—Publisher Weekly

"Engaging...a subtle bildungsroman."—The Washington Post Book World

"Bacon has woven an insightful mother-daughter saga into her depiction of the complexity that is India, creating a satisfying amalgam of past and present."—Booklist

Pankaj Mishra

Publishers Weekly

A trip to India reveals long-hidden secrets and helps a daughter reconcile with her difficult mother in this intelligent, richly atmospheric second novel by Bacon (Lost Geography). In 1992, Anna, a New York poet and grant writer, embarks on a trip to Calcutta to console herself for a double loss: the end of her marriage to a cold, ambitious man and the death of her beloved father. But the trip is largely Anna's attempt to understand her mother, Rose, a largely silent, often stingy, seemingly unloving woman, who was once "an English girl born in Calcutta, raised in its heat, its language. With no one in her household who quite understood her, the largest, whitest girl around. Seen but not known, a fearful combination." As a child, Rose was an innocent caught between the cultures of her remote, widower father and her warm Hindu caretaker, or ayah, in a society where young English girls weren't permitted to "mix" with Indians in public. But Rose's ayah showed the girl compassion and secretly took her to Indian temples and to a Holi celebration, a bacchanal where "men and children throw coloured dye at each other, and for weeks people sport magenta and green on their shirts, scalps, and hands," something forbidden by her father. As she travels, Anna reads a manuscript her mother has given her, which gradually makes plain just how traumatic the consequences of Rose's mixing became. Bacon's obsession is memory, and this novel flows across continents and generations in a wash of poetic images and richly drawn portraits of a family constrained by its inability to open up. Though the interweaving of flashbacks isn't always smooth, unconventional glimpses of India past and present sit vividly side by side with reflections on politics, perception and racial identity. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In her second novel (after Lost Geography), Bacon spins a beguiling mother-daughter tale. Already grieving over the loss of her father, thirtysomething Anna Singer finds herself even more alone when her husband runs off with a younger woman. Feeling adrift, she embarks on a trip to India, where her English mother, Rose, spent her youth and about which she wrote a memoir addressed to her daughter. The narrative shifts between Anna's trip in 1992 and her mother's reminiscences, interweaving their stories and exploring family connections and sorrows. Reminiscent of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club if lacking that book's magic, this intergenerational tale nevertheless sharply evokes the time and place of Rose's girlhood in the waning days of Raj and offers interesting parallels between the two women at similar ages. As Anna travels and reads the memoir, she, of course, uncovers a few secrets as well. Warmly recommended.-Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Bacon's second novel (following Lost Geography, 2000), set in the early '90s, meanders along to India with a recently separated New Yorker who delves with strenuous purpose into the history of her English-Indian mother's upbringing. Mid-30s Anna craves an adventurous change after her husband of five years, architect Mark, leaves her for a younger woman. Yet venturing to India for Anna is something like a betrayal to her tall, awkward mother Rose, who was raised motherless by her scientist father in Calcutta and was eventually sent back to England, in the mid-1940s, under shadowy circumstances. Stern, dispassionate, English Rose has brought up her own two children, Anna and James, now grown and productive citizens, with their American doctor father David in Concord, Massachusetts, never looking back to the Old Country, which she repudiated as being dull and difficult. Yet Anna, a nonprofit writer, armed with a journal Rose has written for her, finds enormous vibrancy in India as she travels from Delhi to Varanasi to Calcutta-such as meeting a younger Israeli man, Lev, whom Anna may or may not pursue, and stepping in to help some young foreign travelers after one of them has died after being hit by a car. Bacon introduces incidentally (and not always with logical organization) numerous subtexts-for example, Anna's desire for a child as one of the reasons for the collapse of her marriage, a desire that, indeed, resonates with her mother's early story. Still, on the whole, the novel doesn't coalesce, since most of the interesting action, both in Rose's past and in Anna's failed marriage, has already happened. Immediate dramatization is missing, though Bacon does preserve a decorous tone inpretty sentences and expert characterization-as in the portrayal of Rose's fierce, suspect, childhood servant Ayah. Admirably, the author resists handing up a predictable denouement-instead letting her tale find its own recalcitrant way. Lovely descriptions of India in a presentation that, still, may puzzle as much as reward. Agent: Virginia Barber/William Morris