Word: grinstead
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...LADDER OF YEARS by Anne Tyler (Knopf). Here's an almost perfect summer-weight, drip-dry, easy-care novel. Delia Grinstead is terminally comfortable, or nearly so, in her life as a 40-year-old wife and mother. The trouble is she has become all but invisible, even to herself. So, one day, on the faintest of whims, she wanders away from the family beach house and lights out for the territories. Such fantasies have grabbed all of us now and then, and Tyler writes her runaway's adventures not just as stylish comedy but as intriguing possibility...
...Brent's life touched many people at Harvard," said E. Andrews Grinstead '97, his roommate. "He touched mine, and I was very thankful that he was my roommate and that Christ was the vision for his life...
Thanks to the magic of Anne Tyler's fiction, Delia Grinstead, the heroine of Ladder of Years (Knopf; 326 pages; $24), is largely freed from such constraints. Married straight out of high school to a doctor 15 years her senior, Delia now finds herself in a comfortable Baltimore home with three nearly grown children and no intelligible reasons for staying where she is. She reads paperback romances out of boredom and feels excluded from the fun. "She was," she tells herself, "a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who hadn't had a champagne brunch in decades...
...Tourist and Morgan's Passing) again blesses her subject with a comic sensibility. The world of Ladder of Years is not one where acts produce serious moral consequences. Delia reads of her disappearance in the newspaper: "A slender, small-boned woman with curly fair or light-brown hair, Mrs. Grinstead stands 5'2" or possibly 5'5" and weighs either 90 or 110 pounds." Her understandable response: "For heaven's sake, hadn't anyone in her family ever looked at her?" And it doesn't take long before Delia acquires as many emotional obligations in her new life...
Raised in East Grinstead, a working-class town south of London, Sullivan attended Oxford, where he read history and dabbled in drama and debate. While president of the Oxford Union, he met Peretz, who was participating in a debate on Middle East policies. Sullivan subsequently attended Harvard, where he earned a master's degree and worked summers at the New Republic; he returned to Harvard to complete his doctoral dissertation on conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott...