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Summary
Summary
New Yorker book critic and award-winning author James Wood delivers a novel of a family struggling to connect with one another and find meaning in their own lives.
In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger daughter, Helen--a music executive in London--hasn't gone, either, and the two sisters, close but competitive, have never quite recovered from their parents' bitter divorce and the early death of their mother. But when Vanessa'snew boyfriend sends word that she has fallen into a severe depression and that he's worried for her safety, Alan and Helen fly to New York and take the train to Saratoga Springs.
Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that might be learned or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection conducive to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favorite philosopher of Helen's puts it, "the only serious enterprise is living," how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, James Wood's Upstate is a powerful, intense, beautiful novel.
Author Notes
James Wood is a book critic at The New Yorker and the recipient of a National Magazine Award in criticism. He is the author of essay collections, the novel The Book Against God , and the study How Fiction Works . He is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Critic Wood's second novel (after The Book Against God) is the intriguing, restrained story of Alan Querry, who, in the last days of the second Bush presidency, is summoned by his confrontational older daughter, Helen, from his comfortable home in Northumberland to Saratoga Springs, N.Y. His younger daughter, Vanessa, is a philosophy professor there. Vanessa's much-younger husband has begun to worry that Vanessa's depression has become unmanageable. Alan also meets up with Helen, a powerful Sony record executive. Helen and Vanessa have always been opposites, differently damaged by their parents' divorce. Now the family faces crisis as they debate questions of "spiritual sadness," ask whether happiness is as inevitable as unhappiness, and struggle to achieve an overdue détente. Wood is at his best when he lets himself go, allowing Alan, whose daughters find him "kind, self-contained, a bit detached," to complain about modern technology or note the subtle differences between U.S. and U.K. life, or when the narrative allows for Wood to hold forth on popular music and European philosophy; the critical bursts are stronger than the story beats. Though the novel might be a little too careful, it remains a strong performance. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An understated novel by the eminent literary critic in which a father confronts problems in the lives of his adult daughters during a trip to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.Wood (The Nearest Thing to Life, 2015, etc.) sets his second novel in early 2007, a time of the Blackberry and Sen. Obama that seems eons ago. The story concerns Alan Querry, a 68-year-old real estate developer in Northumberland, England, whose business has turned rocky around the time he learns that his older daughter needs his help. Vanessa, 40 and a philosophy professor at Skidmore, has had bouts of depression over the years that may stem from Alan's side of the family and from her parents' "bitter divorce" when she was 15. After a recent episode, her younger sister, Helen, a successful Sony music executive in London, and Alan visit her in the States. They find her in reasonable mental health although torn between an urge to return to England and the fear that such a move would upend relations with her first serious lover, the American Josh. Helen, whose marriage is shaky, is mulling quitting Sony for a new project her father might join. Wood, who has written about Who drummer Keith Moon, has fun dipping into the world of pop music. In the course of meals and meetings that are variously tense or pleasant, the Querrys and Josh are presented as reasonable, intelligent adults whose problems are surmountable. Yes, Vanessa does ask at one point, "What if despairkept on returning," and Alan recalls a frightening vision of "all the dead, past and future," while at Hadrian's Wall. But these are rare dark moments in a narrative that tellingly ends with a lush prose cadenza on spring's renewal without ever truly testing its characters and letting them show their mettle.A likable novel in many ways but short on the revelatory heft of serious fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alan, an overextended British developer carefully concealing his financial worries, visits his expat daughter, Vanessa, a philosophy professor in Saratoga Springs, and finds upstate New York, in the grip of winter, equally appalling and fascinating. His younger daughter, Helen, a London music executive, has also made the trip; both are concerned because Vanessa's latest bout with depression included a fall and a broken arm. They also want to meet Vanessa's substantially younger boyfriend. Wood (The Fun Stuff and Other Essays, 2012), a literary critic of the highest order, returns to fiction after a long hiatus, drawing on his extraordinary literary fluency to demonstrate just how far-reaching and profoundly enjoyable a masterful, inquisitive, funny, and provocative novel can be. Every turn in this concentrated and piquant family drama, circa 2007, opens inviting vistas onto the human endeavor, from Alan's conflicted feelings about the old English towns he helped destroy to Helen's passion for music and vision of its techno future to Vanessa's mixed feelings about her relentlessly cerebral, book-rooted discipline. Here, too, is Alan's hilariously precise and slashing tally of the differences between England and America. But it is a father's love for his daughters that propels Wood's beautifully distilled, archly revelatory tale bright with wise insights and thoughtful tenderness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AN ENGLISHMAN IN HIS LATE 60S, a property developer unused to introspection, is informed by one of his two grown daughters (a business executive) that her sister (an academic philosopher living in the United States) appears to have fallen into a dangerous depression. Surprised and alarmed, he flies to New York, where he meets up with Daughter One and travels with her to the small upstate city where Daughter Two has made her home. None of these people have ever been much good at speaking openly about themselves to one another, but it is the intention of the father - one of the three central characters in James Wood's new novel, "Upstate" - that at this crucial moment they will do so, in the hope of coming to an understanding better than the one any of them now has of how their various lives have come to be as they are. The all-important conversation that the father envisions never materializes, but over the course of a week these three will gather repeatedly to walk, talk, eat and drive about, while we, the readers, are privy to their brooding thoughts about themselves, one another, and whether or not life has meaning. The brooding is where the action is. The situation may seem static, but its fundamental premise - that the inner lives of our intimates remain mysterious to us - is a mainstay of modern literature, and out of it novels great, small and mediocre have been made, their various levels of goodness dependent on the skill and urgency - the sheer vitality - with which the novel absorbs us in those very lives. The pivotal event in "Upstate" centers on the daughter responsible for the gathering. Her bouts of melancholy are an old story with the family. From earliest childhood she has been unaccountably unhappy - shy and moody, without friends or interests - unable, like the others, to just "get on with it." No one in the family has ever grasped that for this daughter the simple act of being alive has, almost from birth, been a trial. Consciousness itself is, for her, an ongoing agony. Whether a circumstance or an event proves trivial or dramatic, her distress is of a uniformly high order. She suffers intensely from the constant fear that her lover is about to leave her, her anguish on this score so great she cannot sleep. In the morning, after a particularly restless night, she lies rigid with exhaustion: "Just the prospect of showering, or having to make breakfast ... seemed an immense task." On the other hand, when something as small as the breaking of a favorite bowl occurs, her agitation is equally severe because it means that "everything that is most dear to you will eventually be taken from you." This woman knows - after all, she's a philosopher - that it's natural to wonder whether life has "meaning and design," and equally natural to consider that it doesn't. In which case, she thinks, as multitudes before and after her have also thought, why not, then, face down the burden of our lives instead of caving to naked fear? But she cannot. For her, it is impossible to stop obsessing over the "pointlessness ... the brevity and meaninglessness of things" when "despair - awful, awful despair - kept on returning." It is not necessary that we, the reader, understand, as an analyst might seek to understand, the origin in such a character of a constitution permanently afflicted by the dread of existential nothingness. However, it is very necessary - if the book is to lift itself from the quotidian to the metaphorical - that we feel that dread; and feel it so strongly we connect anew with our own experience of the humdrum anxiety embedded in daily life. If we do not, all is summary and surface. And the latter, I am much afraid, is what prevails in "Upstate." James Wood is famously not only among the most highly regarded literary critics of our moment, he is also one of the most beloved. His detractors, mainly rival critics, may be numerous but his celebrants in the ranks of the educated common reader are legion. For the latter, Wood is the writer whose passion for literature is not only commanding, it is transformative. Clearly a man for whom life without literature is tantamount to life without material nourishment, Wood brings to the practice of literary criticism "the ardor of the artist" - the quality John Keats proclaimed most necessary to the making of all art. In his critical work it is revealed that whatever else he may be - husband, father, teacher, transplanted American, pained agnostic - it is as a reader that Wood does indeed qualify as an artist. His philosophical views of literature often seem to serve a narrow, somewhat prescriptive orthodoxy, but no matter. When he is reporting on a book that has fired his imagination, his readers feel themselves in the presence of a writer immersed in his natural element, drawing on the resources of his deepest self, vibrating very nearly, pencil in hand, with a responsiveness that almost always overwhelms our reservations. In fact, such is his devotion to his calling that it is almost as though he prizes writing only because it leads to reading. In the end, it all comes down to the mysterious matter of inborn sensibility. The question of why a writer can make the words on the page come to felt life in one genre but not another - why the gift of expressiveness is extended here while that of appreciation goes there - this question remains unanswerable. For the reader, it is only necessary that gift there be - the one that makes us feel alive to literature and ourselves when subject, writer and form are brilliantly matched. VIVÍAN GORNICK is the author of "The Odd Woman and the City," among many other books. If the book is to lift itself from the quotidian to the metaphorical, it's necessary that we feel that dread.
Library Journal Review
Alan Querry has never been to America to visit daughter Vanessa, who's teaching philosophy at Skidmore. When he learns from her new boyfriend Josh that she's severely depressed, he hurriedly leaves England, teaming up with Vanessa's hard-driving music executive sister Helen, who needs to be in New York. Somewhat withdrawn and fragile since her mother's desertion of the family, Vanessa seems stymied in her career but crazy about carefree, younger, devilishly handsome Josh. Will he really commit? Was his call for help as much for him as for Vanessa? Questions multiply as Alan wrestles with business reversals, Helen asks for help with the start-up she envisions after quitting Sony, and they both debate what's best for Vanessa, even as the sisters continue their lifelong squabbling and Alan adopts the plangent role of aging but caring parent. Can we be responsible for others' happiness? How do we manage life's "unfinished and perhaps unfinishable complexities?" What's really a life well lived? New Yorker book critic Wood (The Book Against God) contemplates deep questions while painting an indelible portrait of a family coming to grips, clarifying complex, recognizable problems as he moves his characters forward in ways that seem real and satisfying. VERDICT Pitch perfect and highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
