Paradise Farm

Product DescriptionSet in 1929, before the Crash, Paradise Farm probes the disintegration and rebirth of a wealthy Jewish family at a time when the New York art world was in ferment, womens roles were changing, the psychoanalytic movement was burgeoningand Hitlers menace was recognized only by a prescient few.From Publishers WeeklyIn the spring of 1929, just before the stock market crash, a young woman struggles to achieve independence from a welltodo, assimilated Jewish family whose neurotic needs have tremendous psychic impact. Webster (Sins of the Mothers) crafts a comingofage tale exploring the psychological underpinnings of a familys dramatic life changes in a historically portentous moment. While Germany slouches toward the Third Reich and the bottom falls out of the U. S. economy, the Kameners face a critical metamorphosis of their own. Eugene, husband of Agnes and father of their two grown children, Lara and Johnnie, is dying and has arranged for his family to move into the small guest house and rent out their opulent New Jersey home to Muriel and David, a pair of psychologists who plan to transform it into a clinic for disturbed children. The uneasy new household, soon minus Eugene and now including Robin, a little girl whos been mute for a year, gingerly forges new interdependencies headed for destruction, or enlightenment. Lara Kamener, a painter searching for her own original style, is a modern young lady with a secret about her intimate childhood relationship with her brother, a sensitive, gifted, outofwork mathematician with serious emotional problems. Johnnie becomes increasingly obsessed with the news of heightening antiSemitism in Germany, and finds himself consumed by concerns about the fate of Jewish people; he is cruelly conflicted because his own family are selfloathing Jews, anxious to conceal their ethnic heritage. Webster skillfully portrays this troubled soul as a sage, the only Kamener who comprehends his Jewish identity and sees the encroaching danger. Agnes tries to compensate for her lifes disappointments by marrying a young, opportunistic scoundrel. Using a spare prose style resonant with clues to the catastrophic times ahead, Webster deftly conveys a period of social history when women began voicing their sexual needs, unconventional values were infiltrating social norms and new art movements and Freudian psychoanalysis was becoming chic among the intelligentsia. (Mar.) FYI: Webster is president of PEN American Center West. She has loosely based this novel on the life of her mother, modernist painter Ethel Schwabacher.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalWebsters second novel (after Sins of the Mothers, LJ 8/93) centers on a dysfunctional upperclass Jewish family living north of New York City in the 1910s. The patriarch, Eugene, a lawyer with an international practice, has just died, and wife Agnes, daughter Lara, and son John find the loss both liberating and frightening. Helpless, frigid Agnes throws herself at a man half her age who tricks her into signing over much of her fortune. Artist Lara, a stunning beauty, indulges in meaningless love affairs while suppressing the trauma of childhood incest. Mad engineercumkite designer John, cosseted by his neurotic mother and abused by his domineering father, is terminally infantile, attracted to little girls and other unsuitable sexual partners. When Eugene dies, the family decides to relocate to the guest house on Paradise Farm, their home, and rent out the big house to a married couple, practicing psychiatrists who want to treat patients in relative isolation. The setting has possibilities, and Webster creates memorable characters, but this slender novel mostly skims the surface of the milieus her characters inhabit. An optional purchase.?Jo Manning, Univ. of Miami Lib., Coral GablesCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Kirkus ReviewsSecondnovelist Webster (Sins