World Away

Title: World Away
Author: Stewart O'Nan

This is a good summer read.

Drop in on the Langers for a summer during the second world war. Anne, James and and their younger son Jay spend the summer at James' father's home on the shore. James' father is dying. Their older son Rennie has gone to war. Rennie's new bride, Dorothy, is pregnant and living on the other side of the country in California. You will step into their lives at the beginning of the summer on the ride to the beach house and leave them on the drive back home. O'Nan makes you feel as if you are dropped into the middle of their lives like a summer visitor. He gives you enough backstory to understand the characters but leaves some mystery, as if you were a visitor and didn't know all the family history. I love his "slice of life" novels.

As always his writing is compassionate and understanding. Dorothy ponders about her mother that "Their love was an argument, she thought, that she would always lose." With less than 15 words O'Nan brings the fears, hopes, battles and regrets of the mother daughter relationship to the reader's mind. My first thought was "That's me and my mother" . My second, even more fearful, thought was "I hope my daughters don't feel that way about me!"
O'Nan again presents the idea that we cannot understand what happens to a person when he goes to war. His vivid descriptions of war only serve to make me feel that I cannot comprehend going through that and remaining sane. It's interesting too that Rennie is a medic and Larry in Names of the Dead is also a medic. Any thoughts why he does that?

I think you will enjoy this book. It's full of life and rich emotions.

Nancy Pearl in Library Journal, 03630277, 7/1/2005, Vol. 130, Issue 12 says of A World Away -
Displaying a keen sense of time and place depicts an eventful and sad summer in the lives of one American family set against the backdrop of World War II. Former high school teacher James Langer returns to his boyhood home in the Hamptons with his wife, Anne, to care for James's dying father. Their oldest son, Rennie, is in the medical corps aboard ship off the coast of Alaska. Struggling with the fallout from an affair James had with a student, Anne alternates caring for her father-in-law with working at the nearby military hospital, while James is employed at the Grumman plant.

Read Library Journal's review - 05/01/98

NYT Book Review reminded me how this book took me back to the 1943 and war time America with movie plots and the jar of grease in the fridge. The details that set the book in the time period show O'Nan's extensive research.

-vicky