Hill, Robert | When All Is Said and Done

Hill, Robert When All Is Said and Done

Recommended if you're into: Mary Cantwell's Manhatten When I Was Young, glamour as a defense mechanism, Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire

This is the setup:
"It is the early 1960s, and Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sells ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family."

Sometimes the author drove me crazy with run-on sentences that went for pages, but some of the book's best moments are stacatto admissions of ambivalence to the bed they've made for themselves -- "Eight years and four jobs and five pregnancies and meetings and train schedules and formula and diapers and deadlines and clients and mortgage and croup and a revolving door of baby nurses and Dan stagnating in that civilian job I convinced him to take when the Air Force wanted him back for Korea of all things, they got Elvis, they didn't need Dan, a man of his age, for crying out loud, and after what they did to him in that hospital upstate..."

I like explorations of the psyche of women in the 1960's who watched their children adore the nanny more than them and almost felt relieved to leave the house & go to work. It was a rough time to be a working womann (when is it ever been easy, really).

I'll admit, I didn't finish this. Maybe another time.