Conscience
Alice Mattison
(Author)
Description
Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary. Val wrote a controversial book, essentially a novelization of Helen's all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in New Haven. When Olive is asked to write an essay about Val's book, doing so brings back to the forefront Olive and Griff's tangled histories and their complicated reflections on that tumultuous time in their young lives.Conscience, the dazzling new novel from award-winning author Alice Mattison, paints the nuanced relationships between characters with her signature wit and precision. And as Mattison explores the ways in which women make a difference--for good or ill--in the world, she elegantly weaves together the past and the present, and the political and the personal.Product Details
Price
$15.95
Publisher
Pegasus Books
Publish Date
December 10, 2019
Pages
368
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781643132501
BISAC Categories:
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
About the Author
Alice Mattison is a widely acclaimed author and longtime writing teacher. Her novels include The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, and When We Argued All Night. Twelve of her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and other work has been published in The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Ecotone and anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories. A frequent panelist at AWP and other writing conferences, she has held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Yale University, and, for the last twenty-one years, in the Bennington Writing Seminars, the MFA program at Bennington College.
Reviews
While exploring the deeply flawed yet enduring marriage of two Vietnam War-era activists now leading comfortable bourgeois lives in New Haven, Connecticut, Mattison also tackles broader issues. Rewarding and certainly timely; Mattison's complex prose matches the multidimensional moral arguments raging inside her prickly, multidimensional characters.
Alice Mattison's novels often revolve around an intense friendship between women in a leftish milieu. So does her latest, which offers many of the pleasures of those earlier works. A careful observer of gesture and language, Mattison writes warmly about her characters. The inhabitants of this novel all struggle to live ethical lives.
A complex, challenging, riveting new Alice Mattison novel.
Conscience will be a bittersweet read for many who remember the Vietnam War era. Using two narrative strands, related by three richly complex narrators, the book explores a half century in emotional and political depth.
Alice Mattison's novels often revolve around an intense friendship between women in a leftish milieu. So does her latest, which offers many of the pleasures of those earlier works. A careful observer of gesture and language, Mattison writes warmly about her characters. The inhabitants of this novel all struggle to live ethical lives.
A complex, challenging, riveting new Alice Mattison novel.
Conscience will be a bittersweet read for many who remember the Vietnam War era. Using two narrative strands, related by three richly complex narrators, the book explores a half century in emotional and political depth.
