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The Beginners Kindle Edition
Theo and Raquel Motherwell are the only newcomers to the sleepy town of Wick in fifteen-year-old Ginger Pritt's memory. Hampered by a lingering innocence while her best friend, Cherry, grows more and more embroiled with boys, Ginger is instantly attracted to the worldliness and sophistication of this dashing couple.
But the Motherwells may be more than they seem. As Ginger's keen imagination takes up the seductive mystery of their past, she also draws closer to her town's darker history-back to the days of the Salem witch trials-and every new bit of information she thinks she understands leads only to more questions. Who-or what-exactly, are the Motherwells? And what is it they want with her?
Both a lyrical coming-of-age story and a spine-tingling tale of ghostly menace, The Beginners introduces Rebecca Wolff as an exciting new talent in fiction.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRiverhead Books
- Publication dateJune 30, 2011
- File size1466 KB
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In this Amazon exclusive, we brought together authors Rebecca Wolff and Jonathan Lethem and asked them to interview each other.
Jonathan Lethem: What does a poet already know about the stuff of narrative fiction going in--about character, scene, "story"? What does she have to learn on the fly? How did that feel?
Rebecca Wolff: I’m not sure I can speak for all poets (in fact, I’m sure I can’t). Some are quite dedicated to narrative as a basic logical structure for their poems--think of the sort of poem that can be paraphrased: "I was mowing the lawn and then I saw this bird and it made me think of my lost freedoms; and then I saw this leaf fallen on the ground and it made me recall my imminent mortality in such a way that I no longer felt a pang at my lost freedoms." That poem provides an arc not at all unlike the arc of story, with scene, with character. I have never been exactly that kind of poet--I tend to think of my poetic impulse as being more ambient, more akin to a soundscape or dreamscape than a story line--but on the other hand I have always been a hungry consumer of narratives in the forms of novels and film. When I began The Beginners I instantly realized that the most significant tutelage I had absorbed from my reading of narratives was at the level of the sentence: How to begin and end a sentence, and what might go in the middle. So I still did have a seriously steep learning curve, and the first drafts of this novel were so haphazard as to be unredeemable. I had to actually learn that it was in my power to move characters and their story along by forcing them to do things, to say things, to pick up and put down things. When writing poems I prefer to rely on what feels like divine communion with language itself; and when writing a novel one must subscribe to, even love, the banal in a way that can make the complex weave of a story hang together.
Jonathan Lethem: New England already seems dotted with ominous, dreamlike, unreal literary places--the Lovecraft towns, the Shirley Jackson towns. Where's the town of Wick situated on the map of the real and the unreal?
Rebecca Wolff: Wick is exactly that town that you drive through and can’t believe you’re driving through, and that was exactly what made me want to write about it. It is directly based on an amalgamation of a very strange set of towns in central Massachusetts--I hope I’m not preemptively destroying the mystery of the fiction by disclosing this, but I just visited the area again last week so I’m full of the sense of it. One town is called Hardwick, and it is quite near a larger town called, I kid you not, Ware. The two are joined by a hamlet called Gilbertville. I drove through these towns quite often when I used to have to go from somewhere to somewhere else in Massachusetts and they were on the way, sort of--although part of the magic of them is that they are not really on the way anywhere at all, they are set off from anywhere, almost cut off, by the circumstances of their history as described in the novel. So I would be by myself, in the car, full of wonder and a sense of possibility at the question of what could bring anyone there, and who they would find if they arrived there--and that was the seed of the novel.
Jonathan Lethem: You're a descendent, and share part of your name, with one of the Salem "witches" featured in The Crucible. Is this a family matter?
Rebecca Wolff: It is, and this biographical fact is inherently related to questions the novel attempts to raise. Originally, I visited the three towns that became in my imagination Wick, because I was on the trail of my ancestors. My mother had told me that the remaining family of Rebecca Nurse, my ancestor, had moved to Hardwick after the witch trials had claimed the lives of their matriarch. So I went poking around looking for family names in the graveyards there, and what I found made me ask myself: What does it mean to be connected to a beautiful, lonely place by a tragic error? How real are connections that we feel to places, or to people? Is there a kind of magic in our often ephemeral sense of relationship, of connectedness, of history? (One of the main characters, Raquel, is a woman for whom there is no continuity.) Histories are, of course, stories, and so this story attempts to ask what it means to find meaning in stories, in "facts," in their infinite interpretation. Not to be too circular about it. The witch trials are a fascinating study in multiple subjectivities, and in the shifting nature of rationality, as the conviction of the people of Salem that certain behaviors could most reasonably be caused by consort with the Devil would be definitively contradicted soon after. Just as the conviction that the "afflicted girls," the teenagers who were given the power of accusation and upon whom the burden of proof also lay, were under the spell of Tituba, a slave, later shifted to a belief that they had eaten moldy grain and were hallucinating, and later again to a more sociologically determined reading of group hysteria. Semiotic, social, psychiatric, and religious historical treatments all smooth the path toward a reasoned understanding. But as a child growing up with the nominal connection to Rebecca, I was not so interested in these kinds of explanations, and instead immersed myself in the part of the story in which accusations were made, and lingered in that space before the accusations were denied. Though the texts I studied reported that, for example, one of Rebecca’s accusers had been seen to prick her own self with a pin just prior to crying out that Rebecca’s spirit had punctured her flesh, I was loath to dwell on these more prosaic passages. I wanted to be the descendent of a witch, not a victim.
Jonathan Lethem: Henry James. Shirley Jackson. Paula Fox. S. E. Hinton. I'm guessing wildly, but I have to ask you about influence. Pick two and discuss.
Rebecca Wolff: I like to describe The Beginners as a cross between Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and The Turn of the Screw. But seriously, I’d like to order a large James/Jackson combo. My sentences can be Jamesian, though I attempt to unwind them as much as I am able; my conviction that fiction is a perfect place for exploring what is otherworldly, in the midst of or just adjacent to this fabric of "reality," comes out of Jackson.
Jonathan Lethem: I had the feeling you were inspired to try to create real fear in your reader--or perhaps you scared yourself while writing it. Do you identify with "horror"?
Rebecca Wolff: I think being truly frightened is a formative experience for children, and is a foundational experience for the adults they become. Horror, the kind that we create most vividly in our imaginations, gives us yet another opportunity for the experience of finding relief--we run to our parents, we bury our faces in their laps. We find comfort in turning on the light, in being shown that there is nothing under the bed. Ginger, the fifteen-year-old narrator of The Beginners, is just coming out of that period of childish consciousness in which one is quite open to the possibilities of one’s own fancy, and to granting them credence. And just as she begins to feel the pressure of crossing over, she finds herself consorting with adults who occupy a dangerously liminal state and who produce or call out in her an absorption, a giving over to that childish consciousness, even as they call upon her to enter a realm of sexuality that is quite at odds with childhood.
I was very concerned that the book actually be scary. It was my worst fear that the book would simply gesture at fear, without truly evoking it in the reader. The act of writing, just like the act of reading, can be frightening--one necessarily leaves the realm of rationality, or anyway I do--and I was frightened at times writing this book (when I was not engaged with the more banal tasks of making characters pick up and put down their teacups). And I knew that that was exactly the sensation I wanted to create for the reader--as an opportunity for him or her to return or arrive at that kind of open consciousness, the capacity for belief. The book is in part an homage to fear.
From Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
-Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City
"Original, electric, and fearless . . . Every page of The Beginners shimmers with the intensity of language shaped around, aimed at, what can't be said or explained within the convention of a haunted New England town and its teenage antiheroine."
-Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and Trouble
"What a marvel, what a wonder, is this novel. It made me think of Rilke in collaboration with Emily Brontë. . . . Ravishing."
-Peter Straub, author of Shadowland and A Dark Matter
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B004LRPDYG
- Publisher : Riverhead Books (June 30, 2011)
- Publication date : June 30, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 1466 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 300 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,574,837 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #13,173 in Romance Literary Fiction
- #14,749 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #14,752 in Historical Literary Fiction
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Ginger Pritt is fifteen, a good student, and curious about life; she has been close friends with Cherry, a girl two years senior to her. Their closeness is partly due to her deadened home life after the traumatic death of her older brother a few years earlier. Even so, their artificial world of games and pretend, such as imagining that the town's decaying mill is a castle, has faded in its satisfactions, especially for Cherry, who has turned to boys.
That is the situation when the intriguing, lithesome twenty-something Motherwell's, Theo and Raquel, enter the Top Hat Café in Wick, Mass, where Ginger is waitressing. An isolated, independent town, Wick is located in central Mass and seldom sees new residents. She can scarcely believe that they suggest she stop by their residence. With the support of Cherry she finally visits, where she is completely taken by their openness, willingness to discuss so-called adult subjects, especially sex-related matters, and their ready acceptance of her. From that point on, she is unable to stay away in contrast to Cherry's leeriness. Her parents are somewhat dismayed but completely oblivious to the Motherwell's impact.
The Motherwell's claim to be PhD candidates and are in town on a fellowship for research. Raquel plans to write a book based on her claimed direct descent from victims of the Salem witch hunts some 300 years prior, some of whom fled to Wick and surrounding towns. Ginger is hardly deterred when cracks begin to appear in their story. She is totally captivated by the enigmatic and elusive Raquel, whose speech is oddly both intellectual and flighty. Theo's presence is more in the background but is not without consequences. There is no doubt that Ginger is overmatched by the assuredness of this couple; the author maintains a constant tension regarding the question of whether Ginger will benefit or be a victim due to her association with the Motherwell's.
The author's attempt to add to the new couple's mysteriousness by interleaving in the story of witches as well as the haunting evisceration of three neighboring towns that were sacrificed to a dam project is only moderately successful. A disappointment of the book is that they remain largely a shadowy presence, notwithstanding their ability to persuade Ginger. The book certainly has its edgy, sensual aspects, but does not quite live up to its suggested promise, becoming rather muddled in the end. A lingering question is what does the book ultimately have to say about the net impact, either pro or con, on a younger girl given these set of circumstances.
In the way that The Beginners presents a young girl's point of view on the dreams and nightmares of adulthood, I am reminded of Connie from Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" As I read The Beginners, I kept wondering what would happen to Ginger, who welcomes her mistreatment at the hands of the Motherwells, especially Theo, and seems to make bad decision after bad decision. As the novel explores Ginger's thoughts, it all seems so plausible. Real teenagers find themselves just this passively--and even actively--swept into adult situations they cannot control or even fathom. The narrative style is both loaded with detail and elliptical, a combination that sometimes works and sometimes does not. The passages in which Ginger describes her feelings were the best. I remember having feelings and thoughts like that when I was younger. But ultimately, I wish there were more there there. The novel leaves you with many unanswered questions and wraps up rather implausibly. I enjoyed the voice, but finally wished for more solid ground in the narrative.
Check out her bio on her website "Rebecca Wolff.com" you'll find it interesting!!