Three Novels: A Reading

Cathleen Schine is the author of They May Not Mean to, But They Do; The Three Weissmanns of Westport; and The Love Letter, among other novels. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. Cathleen Schine’s novel The Grammarians (Sarah Crichton Books) is a comic love letter to sibling rivalry and the beauty, mischief, and occasional treachery of language. The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret “twin” tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition. The Grammarians is a playful and joyful celebration of the interplay of language and life. Benjamin Dreyer, bestselling author of Dreyer’s English, wrote in the New York Times that “One might well expect a novel about dictionary-obsessed identical twins to throw off one clever, coruscating observation or bit of wordplay after another […]. And The Grammarians certainly does that, and does it wonderfully well. Yet as I read on I found myself not only fascinated and amused―because, I must underline, it’s often hugely funny―but deeply moved, because this is also a novel of great and often aching feeling.”

Roxana Robinson is the author of five previous novels, including Sparta and Cost; three collections of short stories; and the biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Vogue, among other publications. For her novel Dawson’s Fall (Sarah Crichton Books), author Roxana Robinson draws from the lives of her great-grandparents. It is set in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1889, and Robinson’s tale includes entries from her family’s journals and letters as it spans the life of her tragic hero, Englishman Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape. A man of fierce opinions, Dawson came to this country as a young man to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor and part-owner of the Charleston News and Courier, and found a platform of influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his principles - equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence - but couldn’t control the political whims of his readers. As he addressed in his columns questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Finally, Dawson—a man in many ways representative of the country at this time—was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed. Booklist noted that “Robinson’s documentary novel . . . proves unyielding and compelling in its timely themes, with many depictions of how white men’s seething resentment erupts into racist violence and how Southern codes of honor and toxic values, particularly slavery, corroded individual lives and the national character.”

Sarah Blake is the author of the novels Grange House, the New York Times bestseller The Postmistress, and The Guest Book (Flatiron Books), a book, The Washington Post calls, “…monumental in a way that few novels dare attempt.” Kitty Milton and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But as they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir. In 1959 New York City, two strangers enter the Miltons’ circle. One captures the attention of Kitty’s daughter, while the other makes each of them question what the family stands for. This new generation insists the times are changing. And in one night, everything does. Moving through three generations and back and forth in time, The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It shows the untold secrets we inherit and pass on, unknowingly echoing our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.