Confinement

Rating:
Summary: A BEAUTIFUL BUT TEDIOUS READING
Review: Carrie Brown is surely one of the most gifted writers working today. Her prose is luminous, tugging on heartstrings, brilliantly evoking a place. Her first novel, Rose's Garden, stands alone, reflecting Ms. Brown's empathy for and understanding of her characters. Lamb In Love fulfilled the promise found in her initial offering.

With Confinement the author has lost none of her deft pen, her delicately painted scenes, yet for this reader the story was so lugubrious, ponderous that one was oft tempted to put it aside. This effect may well have been brought about by the time protagonist Arthur Henning spends in rumination.

In a nutshell, it is his story. With the aid of friends Arthur and his young son, Toby, have come to the country estate of a New York banker. He is a refugee, driven from his Vienna home by the Nazis and now a widower, having lost his wife, Anna, and infant daughter in a London bombing.

All of this is more than Arthur can accept or comprehend. It was Anna he tells us who had faith and could speak properly to God. As for him, "He could only speak to God as he would speak to anyone, and he did not know, now, whether even Anna would have been able to pray to a God who could fail to rise up against such evil as the world had seen." This paradox haunts him constantly.

Further, in Vienna he was a tailor; here he is a chauffeur. Yet, he has found refuge because there is a cottage for him and Toby, and conviviality with the other servants. Thus, for a decade, Arthur remains somewhat at ease, taking pleasure in watching Toby and the family's daughter, Agatha, grow.

But, at last, his stillness is interrupted when he's ordered to drive Agatha to a home for unwed mothers where she is to have her baby and give it up for adoption. Once again, for Arthur, the incomprehensible is taking place, and it is enough to make him see what his life has become and what might be done.

The denouement? A heartbreaking one that could only flow from the pen of Carrie Brown.

- Gail Cooke


Rating:
Summary: Best I've Read in a Long Time
Review: Like most of Carrie Brown's work, this one radiates with beauty -- the beauty of language and of a great story. Where she has outdone herself is in the emotional effect of the novel. I frankly wasn't prepared to love this book, and indeed felt a little impatient in the first 1/2 chapter or so. But Brown masterfully interweaves not only the characters' lives and circumstances, but also all the different kinds and consequences of love and sacrifice. It's this trait that sets it apart.

There are no cheap thrills or manufactured emotions here... nothing contrived. Brown respects her readers, and it shows. Rather, this novel and its characters step quietly into the reader's life, as if they'd been waiting for our attention all along. They spin their wonderful story, and ask only for us to watch and listen. Believe me, it's enough.

Rating:
Summary: "We are all alone in the end."
Review: Longing, loss and suffering are the themes of Confinement, a gorgeously written and emotionally charged novel by Carrie Brown. I couldn't put this book down. This is a beautiful story, which brims over with passion and symbolism, as Brown melodiously recounts the complex and tortured life of Arthur Henning, a rather cloistered and resolute Jewish man - a refugee from Nazi Austria - who, together with his young son Toby, starts a new life as a chauffeur in America at a country estate, the home of the Duvall family. As his life in America settles, he watches Toby grow up along side the Duvalls' daughter Aggie. When Aggie falls pregnant, Mr. Duvall orders Arthur to drive her to Breakabeen, a home for unwed mothers. Arthur is shocked at the way her parents treat Aggie and when he learns of their decision to put the baby up for adoption he wants to save Agatha. Consequently, he begins to fall in love with her.

The confinement of the title is the confinement of the soul, as Arthur, a lonely man who is hiding from his past, seems unable to reclaim his life. His relationship with Aggie, however, releases him from his emotional slumber. For Arthur, Aggie is also a victim of persecution and confinement. Someone has taken advantage of her - her kindness, her humour and the decency that stood in her character. And his desire for her "becomes a boulder" which he cannot see around. Twenty years of his life in America seems to him a "sorry, shabby thing" and although he has been forced to reinvent himself, his sudden attraction to Aggie makes him question the type of man he has become.

His first winter in America is a private epilogue to the war, "a final, quite chapter in which nothing has happened and every loss will be felt over again." He remembers his wife Anna, and their baby, killed in the London blitz. And he is haunted by images of his friend, pianist and surgeon Dr Ornstein, sitting in his coffee shop just before he was brutally assaulted by the SS. He's obsessed by these ghostly images from the past, living a cloistered life in the United States, while also lamenting his Jewish faith, which "drifts life a river without banks to guide it", forever extinguished in the face of war.

Brown is a gifted stylist, whose prose is meticulously whittled and surefooted. Her powers of description are formidable - Arthur wants his own past to be erased, "to shiver and break up like water fleeing through his fingers." Confinement is narrated in a generous, patient, and intelligent voice, and the author almost presents the subject matter from the perspective of an insider, clear eyed and without sentimentality. This is a fine novel, about a man who feels he has lost everything, and who stands empty handed, but who, in the end achieves redemption. Mike Leonard March 04

Rating:
Summary: FANTASTIC NOVEL
Review: This is a story about an Austrian Jew, forced to flee the country with his family in 1939. He first goes to England where his wife and one of his children are killed in a bombing raid, then comes to America with his other child where he is taken in as a chauffeur by a wealthy businessman in upstate New York. The story begins and primarily takes place after his arrival in America, and concerns his relationship with this family, their daughter, their other servants, and his own son. It is a troubled family, and he is a troubled man.

It is tough to be critical of this novel. The author is clearly intelligent and occasionally her prose shows flashes of brilliance, but taken as a whole, the novel is, quite simply, not significant. The holocaust survivor story is certainly a worthy subject, but it's been done literally hundreds of times, and in many cases by truly great authors. In this case, there is just not enough to make it worthwhile. The characters are not deep, their experiences in America and Austria are not terribly compelling or original, and the setting is mundane. The plot? Well, less than half way through it veers into a fifties' American melodrama, with an unwanted pregnancy, a runaway teenager, and a heartless Dad. One can't help but wonder whether the holocaust survivor thing was simply a device to make this other stuff seem more important.

But it does try, it tries so hard, and is sometimes very good. Here for example, is the protagonist's physical description of his deceased wife, with her, "consoling imperfections, the sprinkling of raised moles across her shoulders, the surprise exposure of gum above her top teeth when she laughed, the asterisks of broken blood vessels at the backs of her knees." This is excellent, vivid imagery. But at the same time, there is too much of this which is extraneous, adds nothing, and becomes a drag on the narrative. Here is the protagonist pulling his car in front of the home in which he believes his grandson resides: "Arthur stopped the car and turned off the ignition. He stared ahead down the empty lane ahead of him. A fence ran along the one side, its posts capped with snow. A bird alighted on one, scattering snow, and then lifted off again and flew away." Beyond stopping the car and turning off the ignition, is any of the rest of that necessary? The novel is loaded with this kind of junk.

There is also a continuity problem in that the scene is shuffled constantly like a deck of cards. Having it move from Austria to America and back again is one thing, but when a chapter starts with Arthur visiting Aggie (his mentor's daughter), during her third week at the Unwed Mother's Home, then shifts within several pages to his visit to her in the first week, then shifts again to a conversation he had with his son at some recent point in time, then shifts once more to a conversation during his son's childhood, it becomes very difficult for one to keep track. When the narrative finally gets back to the third week visit, one wonders if that in fact is where it started.

These issues are problematic but the novel could have potentially overcome them had it had a memorable or complex protagonist at its center. Yes, Arthur is a good man, filled with remorse and longing and haunted by his past, but what motivates him? Is it his love for Aggie which "confines" him to this place? Apparently so, but why? Why is this man, this relationship, special? And no, simply escaping from the Holocaust isn't enough. One finds oneself yearning for a Pnin, a Sophie, a Joe Kavalier even, to give us the emotional attachment this theme requires.

Arthur is haunted by a Dr. Ornstein, a Viennese surgeon whose savage beating at the hands of the Nazis he witnessed in 1939. Bits and pieces of this are fed to us on dozens of occasions throughout the novel. Arthur speaks to Ornstein. He sees Ornstein watching his actions. Yet, towards the novel's end, when it is finally time to describe in detail this life-altering moment, the scene is unbelievably brief. Ornstein's hands are broken. He bleeds. He is carried back into the café. That's it? Of course, it's awful, but after alluding to this event for 350 pages, one expects much, much more. It is not a haunting or even very memorable scene. Instead, it is only disappointing.

Much like the novel as a whole. Intelligent to be sure, and a noble effort, but in the end it is merely a wordy and overindulgent melodrama.

Rating:
Summary: Treads Carefully on a Well Worn Path
Review: This is a story about an Austrian Jew, forced to flee the country with his family in 1939. He first goes to England where his wife and one of his children are killed in a bombing raid, then comes to America with his other child where he is taken in as a chauffeur by a wealthy businessman in upstate New York. The story begins and primarily takes place after his arrival in America, and concerns his relationship with this family, their daughter, their other servants, and his own son. It is a troubled family, and he is a troubled man.

It is tough to be critical of this novel. The author is clearly intelligent and occasionally her prose shows flashes of brilliance, but taken as a whole, the novel is, quite simply, not significant. The holocaust survivor story is certainly a worthy subject, but it's been done literally hundreds of times, and in many cases by truly great authors. In this case, there is just not enough to make it worthwhile. The characters are not deep, their experiences in America and Austria are not terribly compelling or original, and the setting is mundane. The plot? Well, less than half way through it veers into a fifties' American melodrama, with an unwanted pregnancy, a runaway teenager, and a heartless Dad. One can't help but wonder whether the holocaust survivor thing was simply a device to make this other stuff seem more important.

But it does try, it tries so hard, and is sometimes very good. Here for example, is the protagonist's physical description of his deceased wife, with her, "consoling imperfections, the sprinkling of raised moles across her shoulders, the surprise exposure of gum above her top teeth when she laughed, the asterisks of broken blood vessels at the backs of her knees." This is excellent, vivid imagery. But at the same time, there is too much of this which is extraneous, adds nothing, and becomes a drag on the narrative. Here is the protagonist pulling his car in front of the home in which he believes his grandson resides: "Arthur stopped the car and turned off the ignition. He stared ahead down the empty lane ahead of him. A fence ran along the one side, its posts capped with snow. A bird alighted on one, scattering snow, and then lifted off again and flew away." Beyond stopping the car and turning off the ignition, is any of the rest of that necessary? The novel is loaded with this kind of junk.

There is also a continuity problem in that the scene is shuffled constantly like a deck of cards. Having it move from Austria to America and back again is one thing, but when a chapter starts with Arthur visiting Aggie (his mentor's daughter), during her third week at the Unwed Mother's Home, then shifts within several pages to his visit to her in the first week, then shifts again to a conversation he had with his son at some recent point in time, then shifts once more to a conversation during his son's childhood, it becomes very difficult for one to keep track. When the narrative finally gets back to the third week visit, one wonders if that in fact is where it started.

These issues are problematic but the novel could have potentially overcome them had it had a memorable or complex protagonist at its center. Yes, Arthur is a good man, filled with remorse and longing and haunted by his past, but what motivates him? Is it his love for Aggie which "confines" him to this place? Apparently so, but why? Why is this man, this relationship, special? And no, simply escaping from the Holocaust isn't enough. One finds oneself yearning for a Pnin, a Sophie, a Joe Kavalier even, to give us the emotional attachment this theme requires.

Arthur is haunted by a Dr. Ornstein, a Viennese surgeon whose savage beating at the hands of the Nazis he witnessed in 1939. Bits and pieces of this are fed to us on dozens of occasions throughout the novel. Arthur speaks to Ornstein. He sees Ornstein watching his actions. Yet, towards the novel's end, when it is finally time to describe in detail this life-altering moment, the scene is unbelievably brief. Ornstein's hands are broken. He bleeds. He is carried back into the café. That's it? Of course, it's awful, but after alluding to this event for 350 pages, one expects much, much more. It is not a haunting or even very memorable scene. Instead, it is only disappointing.

Much like the novel as a whole. Intelligent to be sure, and a noble effort, but in the end it is merely a wordy and overindulgent melodrama.

Rating:
Summary: FANTASTIC NOVEL
Review: THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE BOOK. That's all I have to say. It has changed my life.