Household Words

Be the first to write a review

All Available Formats + Editions

——

$11.16

NOOK Book

——

$11.16

Household Words (eBook) Pub. Date: 11/17/2005 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
$0.01

$13.95

Paperback

$0.01

$13.95

Household Words (Reprint) Pub. Date: 11/14/2005 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

$0.01

——

Household Words Pub. Date: 8/1/1985 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

Advertising

Overview

The year is 1940, and Rhoda Taber is pregnant with her first child. Satisfied with her comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb and her reliable husband, Leonard, she expects that her life will be predictable and secure. Surprised by an untimely death, an unexpected illness, and the contrary natures of her two daughters, Rhoda finds that fate undermines her sense of entitlement and security. Shrewd, wry, and sometimes bitter, Rhoda reveals herself to be a wonderfully flawed and achingly real woman caught up in the unexpectedness of her own life.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

In Hemingway Pen Award winner Silber's novel, Rhoda Taber has a cushy existence in the Jersey burbs until illness and a death shatter her world and make her reevaluate her life. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Twenty-five years after its release, Norton is reissuing Silber's debut novel of a Jewish housewife, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. Silber's lean, aloof style, which made last year's Ideas of Heaven a National Book Award finalist, is evident here in her first novel about Rhoda Taber, an ordinary woman living an unremarkable life in a 1940s affluent New Jersey community. She's married to Leonard and they're expecting her first child, but "happily" cannot be applied to either of these states-Rhoda is cultured, bright and a great kidder, but her life is somehow hollow and ambiguously disappointing. She gives birth to Suzanne, an unlovely baby, goes to the beach with Leonard, socializes with people she ever so slightly disdains and watches her spectacular mother die. The stuff of life, both mundane and miraculous, is given the same steady treatment, creating a narrative at once familiar and oddly discomfiting. Leonard dies suddenly, leaving Rhoda a young widow with two small girls (including the prettier, overly emotional Claire), but surprisingly, the shape of Rhoda's life changes little. The men her friends fix her up with are all lacking a certain something. Leonard's death has left her wealthier, though she spends little more than she did before. The girls remain vaguely inadequate and out of her emotional reach. The girls grow, Suzanne into a lumbering, angry teenager and Claire into a girl hungry for attention, as Rhoda becomes ill. Her long decline is solitary, painful and a burden to her girls. Silber's exterior approach to storytelling (there is little self-reflection for her characters, and generally their thoughts are shielded from the reader) is an odd fit for acharacter study fashioned into a novel. Nonetheless, she creates a compelling portrait (made a bit haunting for its gaps) of an unsatisfied woman. Hardly new to the scene, this reprint may draw deserved attention to Silber's later work.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393328233
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 11/14/2005
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 743,139
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Joan Silber

Joan Silber, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize for Ideas of Heaven, teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Biography

Joan Slber is the author of four other books of fiction -- Lucky Us, In My Other Life, In the City, and Household Words, winner of a PEN/Hemingway Award. Her work appears in the current O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and in Norton's The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and other magazines. She's received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Silber lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has taught in the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. Program. She is currently at work on a novel about travel, and is also writing a book on time in fiction for Graywolf's Craft of Fiction series.

Silber says that the first story in Ideas of Heaven grew out of an incident someone told her about a dance coach humiliating his female student. The coach's repeated question, "How much do you want it?" suggested, for Silber, the lure of a higher purpose and the religious impulse sometimes embedded in odd places. The story's villain became the protagonist of the next story, and Silber saw that what she really wanted to write about was sex and religion -- "forms of dedication, forms of consolation" -- which she saw often filling in for each other.

Author biography courtesy of the National Book Foundation.

Good To Know

Some interesting outtakes from our interview with Silber:

"The title story of Ideas of Heaven is about American missionaries in China, and I based it loosely on a book of letters from a woman sent out in the 1890s by Oberlin College. I visited China just as I was beginning this story, and something quite amazing happened. In a park in Luoyang a man in his 70s began chatting with me in very good, American-accented English. When he heard I was a college professor, he asked if I'd heard of Oberlin College. It turned out he'd been taught by Oberlin missionaries in Shanxi in the 1930s -- a later group of the Congregationalists who were the models for my characters. I couldn't get over the coincidence, though I don't think it seemed astounding to him. His name is Li Xing Ye (he uses Mark Lee in English), and we've written many letters back and forth since then. I sent him a copy of the book and he was very pleased -- he did say it would take him a long time to read it."

"Grace Paley, my first fiction writing teacher, was a crucial influence. She taught me that humor could be a component of serious fiction and that character was always the thing to look at. Her first assignment was to write something in the voice of an actual person you didn't like.

"I've lived in New York my whole adult life, and as Burt Lancaster says in The Sweet Smell of Success, ‘I love this dirty town.' New Yorkers tend to stake their honor on their degree of self-possession -- whining is okay but panicking is not. They don't necessarily succeed in this and can blunder as badly as anywhere, but this is their standard, their own form of cowboy valor. I have to admit that I'm drawn to this sort of urban restraint."

"When my writing career was not going well, I began putting in volunteer time as a Buddy -- a kind of weekly helper -- to a person with AIDS. It turned out to be a totally great thing to do -- it retuned my perspective and expanded what I thought I could do. I'm still doing it eight years later."

1. Hometown:
  
  New York, NY
1. Date of Birth:
  
  June 14, 1945
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Newark, New Jersey
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 1967; M.A., New York University, 1980

Customer Reviews

Be the first to write a review

( 0 )

Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines

Tell the world what you think of this product.

Add Recommendations

Your Name: Create a Pen Name or Leave Anonymously

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

- HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
- Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
- Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
- Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
- Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
- Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
- Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
- See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble