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Blessings, the bestselling novel by the author of Black and Blue, One True Thing, Object Lessons, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life, begins when, late at night, a teenage couple drives up to the estate owned by Lydia Blessing and leaves a box.
In this instant, the world of the estate called Blessings is changed forever. The story of Skip Cuddy, the Blessings caretaker, who finds a baby asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep her, and of matriarch Lydia Blessing, who, for her own reasons, decides to help him, Blessings explores how the secrets of the past affect decisions and lives in the present; what makes a person, a life, legitimate or illegitimate, and who decides; the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community. This is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and personal change by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about whom The Washington Post Book World said, “Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family.”
Anna Quindlen is the author of three previous novels (Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue), and four nonfiction books (A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud, How Reading Changed My Life). She has also written two children’s books (The Tree That Came to Stay, Happily Ever After). Her New York Times column “Public & Private” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Her column now appears every other week in Newsweek.
Quindlen, the third woman to hold a place among the Times' Op-Ed columnists, had already published two successful collections of her work when she decided to leave the paper in 1995. But it was the two novels she had produced that led her to seek a future beyond her column.
Quindlen had a warm, if not entirely uncritical, reception as a novelist. Her first book, Object Lessons, focused on an Irish American family in suburban New York in the 1960s. It was a bestseller and a Times Notable Book of 1991, but was also criticized for not being as engaging as it could have been. One True Thing, Quindlen's exploration of an ambitious daughter's journey home to take care of her terminally ill mother, was stronger still—a heartbreaker that was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. But Quindlen's fiction clearly benefited from her decision to leave the Times. Three years after that controversial departure, she earned her best reviews yet with Black and Blue, a chronicle of escape from domestic abuse.
Quindlen's novels are thoughtful explorations centering on women who may not start out strong, but who ultimately find some core within themselves as a result of what happens in the story. Her nonfiction meditations—particularly A Short Guide to a Happy Life and her collection of "Life in the 30s" columns, Living Out Loud—often encourage this same transition, urging others to look within themselves and not get caught up in what society would plan for them. It's an approach Quindlen herself has obviously had success with.
Quindlen joined Newsweek as a columnist in 1999. She began her career at the New York Post in 1974, jumping to the New York Times in 1977.
Quindlen's prowess as a columnist and prescriber of advice has made her a popular pick for commencement addresses, a sideline that ultimately inspired her 2000 title A Short Guide to a Happy Life. Quindlen's message tends to be a combination of stopping to smell the flowers and being true to yourself. Quindlen told students at Mount Holyoke in 1999, "Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world."
Studying fiction at Barnard with the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Quindlen's senior thesis was a collection of stories, one of which she sold to Seventeen magazine.
From Chapter One
In the early hours of June 24 a car pulled into a long macadam drive on Rolling Hills Road in the town of Mount Mason. The driver cut the engine, so that as the car rolled down the drive and into the oval turnaround between the back of the big white clapboard house and the garage, it made only a soft swishing sound, like the whisper of summer rain those first few moments after the dirty gray storm clouds open.
There were deer in the fields that surrounded the house, cropping the rye grass with their spotted fawns at their flanks. But the fields stretched so far from the drive on either side, and the deer kept so close to the tree line, that the does did not even raise their divot heads from the ground as the car slid past, although one or two stopped chewing, and the smallest of the babies edged toward their mothers, stepping delicately sideways, en pointe on their small hooves.
“I don’t feel that good,” said the young woman in the passenger seat, her hair veiling her face.
The moonlight slipping at an oblique angle through the windows and the windshield of the car picked out what there was of her to be seen: a suggestion of the whites of her eyes between the curtains of her hair, the beads of sweat on her arched upper lip, the silver chain around her neck, the chipped maroon polish on her nails—a jigsaw puzzle of a girl, half the pieces not visible. She was turned away from the driver, turned toward the door as though she were a prisoner in the car and, at any moment, might pull the door handle and tumble out. The fingers of one hand played with her full bottom lip as she stared at the black shadows of the trees on the rough silver of the lawns, silhouettes cut from construction paper. At the edge of the drive, halfway down it, was a small sign, black on white. blessings, it said.
Blessings was one of those few places that visitors always found, on their return, even more pleasing than the pleasant memories they had of it. The house sat, big and white, low and sprawling, in a valley of overgrown fields, its terrace gardens spilling white hydrangeas, blue bee balm, and bushy patches of catnip and lavender onto a flagstone patio that ran its length. The land surrounding it was flat and rich for a long ways, to the end of the drive, and then the stony mountains rose around as though to protect it, a great God-sized berm spiky with pine trees.
The house had a squat and stolid quality, as though it had lain down to rest in the valley and grown middle-aged. Ill-advised additions had been made, according to the fashion of the times: a den paneled in rustic pine, a long screened porch, some dormers scattered above the horizontal roof line like eyes peering down the drive. The weeping willows at one end of the pond dipped low, but the cedars at the other were too tall and rangy for grace, and there had been sporadic talk of cutting them down almost from the day they were planted. The gardens were of the most conventional sort, hollyhocks in the back, day lilies in the center, alyssum along the borders. Wild rhododendrons grew in the shade wherever a stream sprang from the ground to spill down the hillside and into the big pond, a lake almost, that lay along one side of the house. None of it amounted to much on its own.
But taken altogether it was something almost perfect, the sort of place that, from the road, which was how these two had first seen it, promised plenty without pretense, ease without arrogance. From the road Blessings looked like a place where people would sit on the terrace at dusk, sip a drink and exult in the night breeze over the mountain, pull a light cardigan around their shoulders, and go to bed content. At one time or another, in fact all of these things had been true, but not for some time.
In the fashion of the young, the two in the car, peering down the drive some months before, had convinced themselves that appearance was reality. For the girl, it was the awnings that had finally convinced her, faded green and gold stripes over each window, like proud flags of this little nation-state, where it had been arranged that the sun would never fade the upholstery. That, and a small boat to one side of the pond, in which it was not only possible but indubitable that children could sit safely, row handily, put out a fishing line. In the light from a thumbnail moon the boat, upended on the grass, shone as though a smaller moon had dropped down to earth. The girl saw the sign by the side of the drive in the car’s headlights as a benediction, not as a sign of ownership, the proud name of an old family at the end of its bloodline.
The pond made the car’s driver nervous. It was shiny bright as a mirror, every star, every constellation, even the path of planes, reflecting back within its dark water and seemingly magnified by the pitch black of the night and the stillness of its surface. Frogs called from its banks, and as the car rolled silently into the circular driveway turnaround a fish jumped and left circles on the surface of the water. At the same moment the car tripped the automatic light at the corner of the house’s long porch, and it lit up the drive and the water and the bats that flew crazy eights in search of mosquitoes. The light caught the car itself squarely, so that the two people in the front seat, a boy and girl, each poised between the raw uncertain beauty of adolescence and the duller settled contours of adulthood, were illuminated momentarily as though by the flash from a camera. Their light hair shone, enough alike that at first glance they could have passed for siblings.
“Oh, shit,” said the driver, stepping down hard on the brake, so that the car bucked.
“Don’t do that,” cried the girl. Her hand touched a cardboard box on the backseat, then her own forehead, then dropped to her lap. “I’d kill for a cigarette,” she murmured.
“Right,” whispered the boy harshly. “So you could have an asthma attack right here and wake everybody up.”
“That’s not why I’m not smoking,” the girl muttered.
“Let’s just get this over with,” he said.
The car glided to the corner of the big garage, with its five bays. There was a narrow door on one side of the oblong building, and three flagstone steps leading to it. The boy had oiled the doors of the car that morning, with a foresight and industry and stealth the girl had not expected of him. They had both surprised each other and themselves in the last two days, he with his hardness and his determination, she with her weakness and her grief. Anyone familiar with the love affairs between men and women could have told them that theirs would soon be over.
As he slid out and opened the back door there was almost no sound, only the sort of clicks and snaps that could have been a moth hitting a screen or a raccoon stepping on a stick in the woods that stretched behind the garage and into the black of the mountains and the night. The girl was huddled against the door on her side now, all folded in upon herself like an old woman, or like a child who’d fallen asleep on a long journey; she heard the sounds of him as though they were musical notes, each distinct and clear, and her shoulders moved slightly beneath her shirt, and her hands were jammed between her knees. She felt as though they were somehow alone in the world, almost as though the house and its surroundings were a kind of island, floating in a deep sea of ordinary life through which the two of them would have to swim back to shore by driving back up the drive.
She thought this feeling was because of the boy, and the box, and the night, and the ache in her slack belly and her bruised groin, and the pain in her chest that might have been the beginning of an asthma attack. But she was only the latest in a long line of people who had felt that Blessings was somehow a place apart. In the moonlight the high points of it, the faint luster of the slate roof of the house, the shed on the knoll where the gardener had always kept his tools, the small white boathouse at one end of the pond: all of them were set in high sepia relief like the photograph hung carelessly now on the short wall of the library, the one of Edwin Blessing, who bought the place when it was just another old farm and lavished money on it in the years when he had money to spend. The people from Mount Mason who worked there, washing up at the parties in the old days, fixing frozen pipes for the old lady in the years after the parties ended: they all said it was like going somewhere out of this world, the quiet, the clean smells, the rooms and rooms full of polished furniture and toile draperies, which they only glimpsed through half-open doorways. Above all the pond, the gardens, the land. The real world tried to intrude from time to time upon Blessings, but usually the real world failed.
1. Blessings is a title that holds a great deal of meaning for this book, as the name of the Blessings’ house, but also in the metaphysical sense of the word.. Before reading the book, what did the title Blessings suggest to you? Did it create any expectations or shape the way you reflected on the book as you read? When you finished the book, what meaning did you take away from the title Blessings?
2. The Washington Post has said of Anna Quindlen’s work, “Quindlen knows that all the things we ever will be can be found in some forgotten fragment of family.” Family seems to be connected to many of the fundamental and important themes of the novel. How might this tribute be applied to Blessings?
3. The formation and preservation of family, traditional or not, is one of the prominent, underlying themes of the novel, and Quindlen introduces us to several families throughout. Describe some of these families, their relationships, and the ways in which these families function as such. How are they similar? Different? What effect do these similarities or differences have on the characters and the story as a whole? Is one individual important in each group, if so, how?
4. How does Quindlen show the evolution of what is typically considered “family” over the course of the book? Do you think that Skip, Lydia, and Faith have formed a genuine family? If so, why, and if not, why not?
5. At the heart of Blessings is the issue of legitimacy. By traditional standards, both Meredith, Lydia’s own daughter, and Faith would be deemed “illegitimate” children. When Faith’s mother emerges, and seeks custody of her child, issues of the legitimacy of Faith’s life with Skip are raised. What makes a person legitmate, or illegitimate today, or for you? Who decides, or who should decide?
6. In a society and a world that is constantly changing, is there such a thing as a “normal” family? What makes the “family” of Blessings–Skip, Lydia, and Faith–either normal or unusual, and what allows them to function as a family unit?
7. Love as a natural process is a prevalent theme in Blessings, and Quindlen shows it to be both instinctual and learned. Where do we see love as a natural instinct, and where do we see it as a learned quality? How do these differences in abilities and capacities for love shed light on the various characters? What do these emotional variations ultimately say about the nature of love and loyalty?
8. All of the main characters, including Faith, have histories that haunt them. Lydia harbors the memory of her brother, and Skip finds himself constantly trying to escape an unwarranted but poor reputation. In Blessings, how does the past become an influential part of the present? At what points does memory affect characters’ actions in the present, or change the way in which a specific event is played out? Do either Lydia or Skip ever fully escape their pasts, or must they embrace them in order to lead fuller, more productive lives in the present?
9. The narrative structure of Blessings provides a literary framework that is important to the story and to our ability to connect with its characters. Describe the book’s narrative structure. What effect did it have on your experience as a reader? Did the time-present/time-past structure of Lydia’s story, interwoven with the day-to-day story of life at Blessings, allow her to be a more sympathetic character? How does the narrative structure of the novel parallel, tap into, and connect with some of the book’s themes?
10. The notion of individuality figures prominently into Blessings, and brings up questions about the individual’s place in the community, and the advantages and disadvantages of social conformity. Give some examples of scenes or situations from the book where the beliefs of an individual are challenged by the value system of a community. The situation which comes to the forefront of this issue is Skip’s ultimate decision to return Faith to her birth-mother, so she can be raised in a more traditional family. Do you agree with Skip’s decision? Were you satisfied with this conclusion? If not, how would you have liked to see it end?
11. Several characters discover a sense of redemption by the close of the novel. In what ways did you, as a reader, sense Skip and Lydia had been redeemed, and what were the causes of that process? The redemptive power of love is prevalent throughout. In what other characters do we see this change?
12. Quindlen uses dialogue as a tool not only to explain what a character is thinking or doing at the moment, but to provide insight into what moves and compels his or her actions and emotions. Through dialogue, Quindlen allows the reader to really get into the mind of a character. Discuss the nuances of the dialogue used throughout the book. How do speech patterns and thought patterns differ, and how do these differences influence your view and understanding of a given character?
13. Avid readers of Quindlen’s work may be familiar with her non-fiction writings and journalism. As a Quindlen fan, was there anything about Blessings that reminded you of Quindlen’s journalistic perspective–aspects such as astute observation of people, story-telling ability, etc.–that called to mind the skills of a good reporter?
Anonymous
Posted April 17, 2010
This book will be one that you will reach for even after it's over. The story is beautiful and the characters are flawed in an endearing way. I read this in snatches (small children at home) but it was wonderful and SO easy to "get back into.":-) At one point it made me cry and my 4 year old couldn't understand how a book can make you cry - keep the tissues handy. It is a story you will be glad you read! The book makes you feel like you are there - beautifully written and incredible descriptions of a home past it's prime.:-) Enjoy and pass it on - well worth the read!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 8, 2008
This is another great piece of writing from Anna Quindlen who is dependable whether in columns or novels. Her characters are real, her descriptions of love are honest and the story unfolds with secrets wrapped within secrets. There is emotional truth on every page and an ending that speaks to enduring love and decency.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 15, 2007
This book is very good. The story skips from Lydia's past to her present alot. But the storyline of Skip and Faith is wonderful. I wish the ending would have been different but oh well.... Wonderful story!!!!
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 10, 2005
I bought the book on a whim, and I was greatly disappointed. I finished it, but it was tough. The idea is riveting, but the author fails to deliver the twists with a dramatic flare. Therefore, the portions where readers should be shocked, fall with an anticlimatic bang. Another problem was the description in the book. She described the scenes to the point of obsurdity. At times I found myself reading on and on about chairs.
2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 17, 2004
I have started this book FOUR times, and cannot get into it! Quindlen needs a good editor, who will separate the wheat from the chaff...break up some of the rambling sentences, for starters. One sentence was 50 words long, another was 83! An 83 word SENTENCE! That's ludicrous! Yes, I found the book so boring that I resorted to counting words in sentences! I don't know HOW this book ever made the NY Times Best Seller list!
2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 6, 2011
Blessings tells the story of Lydia Blessings, an old woman who lives by herself in a large house with her namesake. She has a new gardener/handyman named Skip who lives in an apartment above the garage, and a cantankerous maid named Nadine. One night Skip finds a newborn baby in a box lying on his doorstep. At first he tries to hide her from everyone, but eventually everyone at Blessings knows about the baby. Soon they all begin to see their own lives transformed by the influence of this tiny, innocent creature. Lydia especially finds her own heart softening, reliving past memories of her own childhood, as well as her daughter's childhood.
The main message I found running through the book is no one is an island. We all must have interaction with other human beings in order to survive. Indeed, if we truly want to thrive, the only way to do this is to cultivate meaningful relationships with others. Faith, the baby left on Skip's doorstep, is the physical embodiment of this message. She literally won't survive unless Skip takes care of her. Lydia is the emotional embodiment of the message. She seems to be a recluse, hiding in her house, hardly daring to even go outside. And yet, she will peek through her windows with binoculars to watch what goes on outside. She needs social interaction, but denies herself of it. But as the story progresses, Lydia opens herself up bit by bit to her friends and family, and finds healing for her own heart.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 7, 2007
Joan Allen meets Anna Quindlen: what a great match. Previous reviews are of book only, but the combination of Allen's reading of Quindlen's text makes something very special indeed.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 16, 2005
It was difficult to believe that the caretaker would want to raise the infant and the author failed to explain this. Also there was too much going back and forth from the past to the present which made the reading choppy. I was disappointed since I had just finished reading Black and Blue by the same author and thought that was very good.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 3, 2013
Not the best.
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Posted July 3, 2006
Ultimately, Anna Quindlen has proven she is a better observer of life than as a novelist. I think Blessings is the epitome of this truth. Blessings was not a bad novel, as it was overwrought with sometimes seemingly unimportant past recollections with characters, especially with Lydia Blessings. Skip Cuddy was the most fascinating of the characters, exceeding my expectations. As with what Quindlen often discusses is the relationships with our family and how that inevitably interacts with the quintessential question 'Who am I?' An irritating aspect of this novel was that Quindlen wrote in highly stream of conciousness mode of skipping from the present tense into the past tense. Disappointing, but I will still read Quindlen.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 4, 2004
Bad characterization. Our disbelief with the character caused us to mistrust the rest of the plot - and abandon the book after the fourth chapter. We are glad that we only borrowed the volume, and not bought it. Waste of money and time. If you are so naive as to believe this plot and characterization, then go ahead and buy.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted September 8, 2004
After a slow start, I was very impressed by this book. From the reviews and description on the book jacket, I was afraid that this would be Anne Tyler Lite. While I like her writing very much, this book was much deeper than what I have read by Tyler, if not as intimately written as Tyler's books. Like Richard Russo's Empire Falls (one of my all-time favorites) the book deals with a wealthy matriarch living in a large estate. But unlike that book, which held the old lady up as an enigma, Blessings gets into her mind by having her help her groundskeeper raise an infant left on his garage/apartment doorstep (the baby was obviously left there to be taken care of the rich owner of the estate). The most interesting parts of the book are the flashbacks into her own life that explain what forced her out of Manhattan debutante life and into lifelong exile at her family's country estate. At time the book reminded me of Ian McEwan's Atonement, but never actually reaches the heights of that book.
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Posted January 12, 2004
Wow. This was an excellent book. Anna Quindlen keeps a wonderfully soft grip on the reader with her extraordinary character development and perfect pacing. I loved the book. I loved the characters. Most of all, I loved the subtext of the book for its definition of family.
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Posted November 18, 2003
My first contact with a Quindlen manuscript. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. There were some spots that dragged (Lydia's past). Lydia, Skip, Jennifer, Nadine - all strong character developments. Reminded me of 'The Lovely Bones'. Same lyrical style as Belva Plain. A predictable story line but revelations on family, love, loss, and redemption make it a worthwhile read. Readable on a rainy day with a good cup of coffee.
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Posted November 17, 2003
I've enjoyed Anna Quindlin's columns in the NY Times, but haven't really liked her books so far...keep hoping that she'll be a little more realistic in the future. (But, in saying that, I was very disappointed when the baby in the story was returned to her birth mother!)
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Posted November 16, 2003
I like to read to wind down before I go to sleep at night, most books take a week or two, this one took me three months, I just couldn't get into it, and I can't start a new book until I finish the current book I'm reading. Pretty boring. Sorry.
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Posted October 25, 2003
I hate not finishing a book, but this one I just can't stay awake while reading it! Sorry, way tooooooo boring!
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Posted October 30, 2003
The story line reminds one of Driving Miss Daisy - the elderly widow of the estate - the sympathetic household help - the deep secrets that both Mrs. Blessing and Skip Cuddy hold inside. The small infant brings out long hidden warmth in the main character . Very touching as a novel - interesting - but difficult to stick with to the end.
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Posted October 11, 2003
The lessons of love and living are nicely and neatly portrayed, and the way in which older people relive and relate to the past is done with great understanding. It is in the action that this book has its weakness. The response of Mrs. Blessing to the scene of the crime in her home does not ring true, and the wrap-up of the story just rushes forward from there without the careful attention to detail and description that made reading up to that point enjoyable.
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Posted August 29, 2003
It was difficult to believe that a young man wanted to raise a baby that he found on the steps to his apartment. The story seemed far-fetched and I had a hard time finishing the book.
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Overview
Blessings, the bestselling novel by the author of Black and Blue, One True Thing, Object Lessons, and A Short Guide to a Happy Life, begins when, late at night, a teenage couple drives up to the estate owned by Lydia Blessing and leaves a box.
In this instant, the world of the estate called Blessings is changed forever. The story of Skip Cuddy, the Blessings caretaker, who finds a baby asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep her, and of matriarch Lydia Blessing, who, for...