Margot: A Novel

by Wendell Steavenson

Overview

A moving portrait of a young woman’s struggle to break free from her upper-class upbringing amid the whirlwind years of the sexual revolution.

It’s the mid-1950s and Margot Thornsen is growing up between a Park Avenue apartment in New York City and her family’s sumptuous Oyster Bay estate, as the presumed heir to her late grandfather’s steel fortune. Stuck in the mores and bores of WASP society with its cocktail parties and white-gloved galas, Margot is constantly rubbing against the strictures of her domineering mother, who never misses an opportunity to lecture her on the importance of marrying well. Meanwhile, Margot dreams of microscopes and beetles and books.

As she comes of age in the 1960s, a time of war and assassinations and riots, Margot’s path diverges and she finds herself in the expansive world of Radcliffe College, navigating a new age of sexual liberation, scientific discovery, acid trips, and rock ’n’ roll. The old rule book has been burned. There are no more limits. But now that she can choose, what does Margot really want?

Hailed for her “intelligent and heartfelt fiction” (Kirkus Reviews), Wendell Steavenson writes with grace, precision, and great psychological perception. With Margot, she has crafted an intimate portrayal of the quiet torment of young women of the era, a comically caustic mother-daughter story, and a memorable evocation of one woman’s passion for the wonder of science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324020844
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,013,501
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Wendell Steavenson, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the Financial Times, and Granta, is the author of the novel Paris Metro and three books of reporting. Born in New York and raised in London, she now lives in Paris.

Editorial Reviews

11/28/2022

Steavenson (Paris Metro) returns with a layered if formulaic coming-of-age story set during the political and sexual revolutions of the 1950s and late ’60s in New York. At the center is verbally abusive mother Peggy Vandeloep’s constant refrain about her only daughter: “What in heaven’s name are we going to do about Margot?” Peggy first utters the question after Margot falls from an oak tree at age eight. The independent Margot, six feet tall at age 12, enjoys a privileged youth spent between her family’s Park Avenue apartment and their Oyster Bay, Long Island, estate, all funded by United Union Steel money. Childhood and adolescent friends include sympathetic Long Island neighbor Trip Merryweather, his three brothers (one of whom helps Margot’s friend get an abortion), and West Point graduate Sandy Full, a GI who secretly writes poetry. Scientifically gifted Margot defies her mother’s expectation that she marry and instead heads to Radcliffe, where she studies biochemistry under a professor who declares they’re there to “slice and dice the human genome.” Meanwhile, she pursues an affair with one of her lab partners and exchanges letters with Sandy, who encourages her free thinking. The Vietnam War and political unrest contribute to the atmosphere, and Steavenson adds rich scientific detail to the lab scenes, but the expositional dialogue and overly familiar emotional terrain tend to wear on the reader. This doesn’t quite stand out. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2022

After three books of reporting (e.g., Circling the Square) and the well-received novel Paris Metro, Steavenson tells the story of Margot Thornsen, raised simply to marry by her wealthy family (think Park Avenue and Oyster Bay). A terrible fire destroys the family's financial base and frees Margot to follow her wishes by attending Radcliffe—just as the Sixties swing into place.

Library Journal

2022-10-12
Journalist-turned-novelist Steavenson follows a young woman’s quest for fulfillment from a privileged, unhappy childhood through graduation from Radcliffe in 1968.

The author skillfully sets the scene with 8-year-old Margot Thornsen’s fall from a treehouse. Her self-absorbed mother’s reaction to the diagnosis of a concussion? “Don’t whine,” she tells her weeping daughter as the wound is stitched shut. Once-bold, adventurous Margot is transformed overnight into a cautious, fearful child, though this seems an inevitable reaction to Mother’s constant criticism. Margot’s growth spurt to 6 feet is viewed by Peggy Vanderloep Thornsen as one more impediment to her finding a suitable husband, along with the girl’s mystifying interest in science and regrettable tendency to do well in school. Steavenson depicts her characters with very broad strokes, and the 1950s and ’60s landscape is decidedly generic, but her portrait of the post–WWII American upper class, on the brink of change but still implacably bound to old ways, is unquestionably compelling. Margot’s fascination with biochemistry, which blossoms at Radcliffe into a determination to pursue a career as a scientist, is as credible and engaging as her ongoing infatuation with Trip Merryweather, the boy from the mansion next door. Forever keeping Margot on a string while he pursues prettier girls, Trip is one of the many strongly delineated secondary characters. They include Trip’s much more sympathetic older brother, Richie, a medical student; Margot’s free-spirited friend Maddy, whom Richie helps get a safe though illegal abortion; and Sandy Full, who casts a sardonic eye on the cluelessness of the privileged from his vantage point as the son of someone who “married the help.” The extent to which Margot is enclosed by this world can be judged by her thought when Sandy says he’s from Philly. “Frilly? Was that somewhere in Connecticut?” Her liberation from this stifling cocoon is only partially complete, as the novel ends with her departure for London, leaving behind a whole lot of unfinished business that blatantly signals there will be a sequel.

There's little new in this familiar coming-of-age tale, but it's extremely readable and has an appealing protagonist.

Kirkus Reviews