Fiction, Fiction Subjects

Whispers

Name: Whispers
Author: Belva Plain
ISBN: 9780440216742

by Belva Plain

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Overview

Robert and Lynn Ferguson are a picture-perfect couple with two beautiful daughters and a lovely home in an exclusive Connecticut community. Robert is on the fast track of a major corporation. Lynn is devoted to her family and good works. But in the Ferguson's closed doors hide a painful secret Lynn must keep from the world-and her children-at any cost... Not even the Fergusons's best friends, Josie and Bruce Lehman, know of Lynn's shame. Social worker Josie sees her bruises distrusts the too-ambitious, too perfect Robert, and suspects the real cause of the children's increasingly disturbed behavior. But not even Josie can pierce Lynn's wall of silence, a wall that will not crumble until Lynn is forced to face herself-and the truth-at last. Belva Plain's searing novel of a family's heartbreak, a woman's courage, and a subject too often talked about only in whispers.

As in her latest bestselling novel Treasures, Plain tells an engrossing tale of a contemporary family and the realities that lie below the surface of their perfect lives. A woman is unable to admit to anyone, much to herself, that her idyllic life is based on a lie. She struggles to free herself from a cycle of violence, contrition, and more violence--and finally emerges in triumph.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

Plain's accomplished portrayal of a seemingly perfect Connecticut homemaker and her abusive husband was a PW bestseller. (Apr.)

About the Author, Belva Plain

Known for her dramatic love epics with vivid characterizations Belva Plain first entranced readers back in 1979 with the made-for-miniseries romance, Evergreen.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Plain's accomplished portrayal of a seemingly perfect Connecticut homemaker and her abusive husband was a PW bestseller. Apr.

Ray Olson

Plain's latest is impeccably done and ought to please her large readership. It isn't literature, to be sure, but it's the kind of book that reminds us that, since its inception, the novel has been used for instruction and consolation. Richardson's epistolary novels were originally meant to teach good letter-writing style. The biggest nineteenth-century U.S. best-sellers were as much manuals of moral conduct and Christian reassurance as good stories. Indeed, many weren't very good stories, and neither is "Whispers". It's the chronicle of the domestic crises of an upper-middle-class woman married to an ambitious, image-obsessed executive who flies into violent rages when he feels thwarted. Yes, she's the long-suffering spouse of a wife beater--a setup right out of the so-called four-hankie movies of the 1930s through 1950s that used to star actresses named Joan, Jane, Jean, and June. Plain's purposes in rehearsing this scenario again are to illustrate what an abusive relationship is, to inculcate that it can afflict women in even the best strata of society, to sympathetically model getting out of such a situation, and to stress how difficult getting out can be even--perhaps especially--for a good, smart, talented woman. She succeeds admirably and affectingly, and her heroine's trials and eventual triumphs will instruct and console a huge audience.

Kirkus Reviews

The plight of the battered wife is the subject of Plain's latest (Treasures, 1992; Harvest, 1990, etc.)—in which an Iowa- bred suburban Connecticut housewife and mother suffers the sporadic rages of a successful career husband. "To live with Robert was to dwell in sunlight for months and months; then suddenly a flashing storm would turn everything into darkness...." Although Robert at first blamed Lynn for the drowning death of their toddler, he had been cautioned in his judgment by wiser heads, and now, in 1988, Robert and Lynn live—to the public at least—in harmony in a comfortable house filled with tasteful things: "Either the best or nothing" is Robert's dictum. Handsome, certainly involved with his family, hard-working, and on his way up, Robert, who also enjoys giving thoughtful gifts, is surely still the man Lynn fell in love with. But a dinner jacket not packed for an important business trip, a crazy suspicion of interest in another man, too sharp an argument, then—the violence, followed by Robert's cringing apology. Some friends and acquaintances "know"—kind Bruce and his dying wife, Josie; lawyer Tom Lawrence, who seems to take an unusually strong interest in Lynn; and the family of teenaged Harris, boyfriend of Lynn and Robert's daughter Emily. Meanwhile, the children, Emily and Annie, seek their own refuges and rebellions, but it is not until after the birth of baby Bobby—and some sleuthing that reveals the truth about Robert's first marriage—that Lynn accepts her loss—and is nearly murdered. This time out, Plain covers the essentials in her psychological profiles of batterer and batteree—in a straightforward tale about agentle woman determined to make the best of things and a man whose bright blue eyes can suddenly blaze black. A shoo-in, of course. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for Spring)