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Author: Beth Gutcheon
Review: Loviah French is stuck. Having come from the wrong side of the tracks she has gotten into an elite prep school on scholarship. While there she belongs without belonging, ultimately graduating with two opposite, but life long friends. Instead of attending college like them, she instead interns with a high end dress shop, ultimately becoming an in-demand dresser for the rich and famous; including her friends. She has a relationship with a married family man, stealing bits of time and happiness around his life. She is a women stuck on the edge of all the grand social status that New York has to offer, but is never quite able to take those final steps into that sphere.
The story of her two friends is told through the eyes of Loviah, as she goes from awkward teen to matronly godmother. And it is the term godparent that the title gossip is derived from. In the book the word gossip was a historical term for the godparents, as it would be their job to talk about the godchild over the years. Gossip was a good thing discussing a child you both loved. We see this talk between Loviah and her wild roommate Dinah, always the contrarian; and between Avis, the older more prim and proper girl.
The two opposing friends endure each other for the sake of their love of Loviah; and ultimately they are fused together, for better and for worse, through their association for her. I see this book as Loviah’s endless struggle to love both her friends without disparaging the other. To balance their eccentricities and walk the highroad; to be a good friend.
What is never explicitly discussed in the book, but is central is how Loviah must have walked her own path through life. A scholarship girl, who works in a service capacity to the society women, who also is having an open affair with a married man; her life must have been subject to the small minded gossipers who definitely did not have her best interests at heart. Her experiences must have refined her so much that she is able to hold her head up high, to proudly be a friend to those around her.
One of my favorite quotes in life is to treat all those you meet as damaged in some way, having secret struggles, and most of the time you would be right. Loviah’s is a life that has seen a lot of struggles, yet she triumphs as a friend. Through all the vicissitudes of life, she is there for the ones she loves, even if they do not necessarily care for each other. It should be noted that this book finishes with a bang a little out of step with the first 85%, but in a good way. Sort of sprinting for the tape at the end of a race. A great story well worth reading.
Publisher: Published March 20th 2012 by William Morrow
ISBN: 9780061931420
Copyright: 2012
Pages: 384
Quick Review: 4 stars (out of 5)
Why I Read It: Sent by Leyane Jerejian | Publicity Manager at FSB Associates.
Synopsis: The critically acclaimed author of Good-bye and Amen, Leeway Cottage, and More Than You Know returns with a sharply perceptive and emotionally resonant novel about all the ways we talk about one another, the sometimes fine line between showing concern and doing damage, and the difficulty of knowing the true obligations of friendship.
Loviah “Lovie” French owns a small, high-end dress shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Renowned for her taste, charm, and discretion, Lovie is the one to whom certain women turn when they need “just the thing” for key life events: baptisms and balls, weddings and funerals. Among those who depend on Lovie’s sage advice are her two best friends since boarding school days: Dinah Wainwright and Avis Metcalf. Despite the love they share for their mutual friend, there has always been a chilly gulf between Dinah and Avis, the result of a perceived slight from decades ago that has unimaginably tragic echoes many years later.
An astute chronicler of all that makes us human, Beth Gutcheon delivers her most powerful and emotionally devastating novel to date. Gossip is a tale of intimacy and betrayal, trust and fidelity, friendship and motherhood that explores the way we use “information” — be it true, false, or imagined — to sustain, and occasionally destroy, one another.
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FYI: Where a Novel Comes From- 1 copy of Gossip from the publicist - Giveaway
By Beth Gutcheon,
Author of Gossip
Author of Gossip
In my experience, a novel accrues, over time and from many sources, with ideas and aspects seeming to light up until enough of them form a cluster that can become a story. I read a lot of biographies and I love volumes of letters because they give you authentic voices, the diction and vocabulary of a period. A major plot line in my novel Leeway Cottage came from one sentence in a book of letters by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Her fiction doesn't speak to me at all, but her letters are brilliant and wonderfully frank and full of the daily details of a life. At one point the love of Sylvia's life left her for a younger woman who was more beautiful and far richer than Sylvia. She bore it quietly, in spite of being devastated, because she wanted her lover's happiness even more than she wanted her own. Eventually, Valentine came back, and Sylvia wrote to a friend this incredibly simple explanation: her rival had all the advantages, except that "I was better at loving, and being loved."
What a thing to say, what a thing to understand.
I think Gossip started with a biography of Emily Post. I'm a longtime fan of Mrs. Post, a very witty writer and brave, self-reliant and deeply considerate woman. Etiquette books in general paint a vivid picture of changing manners and mores, but Post's are the most fun. From her 1928 edition one learns that is shocking to allow your butler or footmen to sport facial hair of any kind. Who knows, in this Downton Abby world, when that might come in handy? (As you can infer, I find a lot of research material in second hand bookstores.) Mrs. Post is brisk and confident, but a crusader against snobbery and fussiness, and I thought I might do a character based on her, but instead turned out to use Tuxedo Park, the very grand, very early gated community where she spent much of her childhood and where she is buried. It was the perfect symbol for one of the questions the book raises: what does it mean to be an insider in society? What does it mean to choose to be an outsider? A maverick, if you will? By society, I mean any group that sets the tone for a community, be it the local grange in a farming village, or Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred.
This is real life, but it is also Edith Wharton territory, of course; so many of her New York plots are turned by the terrible power of social judgments and gossip. But in Wharton's world, and in Mrs. Post's, there is a recognized social standard and body of opinion. Our world is very different. The true purpose of manners, according to Emily -- I think of her as Emily, since she feels to me like a friend -- is to treat others with consideration and kindness and avoid making people uncomfortable. In my mother's youth, good manners required addressing people formally unless you were truly familiars. When she insisted, though, on calling my friends "Mrs. Todd" or "Mr. West" although she was 35 years older than we and we were wearing blue jeans with our hair down to here, it didn't seem polite, it just seemed weird, really a protest or rebuke, if not actually to us, then to the world for changing and shifting the ground beneath her feet.
So the deal with manners is not propriety, but kindness. Which reminded me of the "Iago question," which you hear a lot about if you're an English major. What is his motive, why is he evil? Does he even know? He does seem to be one of the few characters in literature or life who actually knows that he's mean. So I re-read Othello, and Othello led me again to the subject of gossip, or rather to the fact that knowledge is power, and words are weapons. I began to think of a modern character who winds up doing something like what Iago does, but in such a way that we understand what she thinks she's doing when she does it. You almost never meet with pure malice outside of a mental ward, but you certainly all the time meet with people who do casual harm to others while feeling swell about themselves, and that seemed like a proper subject for a novel.
But is that really where this particular novel came from? I think we all wonder why some things lodge in memory when we forget so much else; someone once told me we remember moments when we learned things. Here's a moment from when I was about seven. The subject of rumor had come up, maybe in life, maybe in a book. My mother told us about the girl who went to confession because she'd said something untrue about somebody else. The priest said that as a penance, she was to go outside, cut open a feather pillow, and empty it on the breeze. Then she was to retrieve all the feathers. I remember my childhood bedroom, blue wallpaper, my sister's horseshow ribbons on a string above the mantel, the clock on the wall in the shape of a black and white cat with eyes and tail that went back and forth as it ticked, and that story.
© 2012 Beth Gutcheon, author of Gossip
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