The Loved Ones

by Mary-Beth Hughes

Overview

A novel of a wealthy family in midcentury America and the flaws beneath the surface, from “a writer of dexterity and imagination.” (New York Times Book Review).

As the 1960s draw to a close, the Devlin family lead almost-perfect lives. Dashing father Nick is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and throws dinner parties while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are silently broken by the death of their little boy. As Nick’s older brother, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cutthroat world of the cosmetics industry, the Devlin family, fragmented by betrayals, will become victims of the cruelest kind of hurt.

“Mary-Beth Hughes's body of work casts a dreamy, hypnotic effect, even while slyly exposing the risks and rewards of love and its devastations among the upper class.”—Elle

“There’s a lot of smoking, bourbon, bangs and center parts. People have live-in help with whom they play bridge. But the book glosses these details lightly; to the extent it is a period piece, it is in the way it summons a now somewhat dated idea of luxury, ambition and, by extension, accomplishment… it amazes me how many of the book’s images have stayed with me.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Hughes is a quietly devastating writer, reminiscent of Evan S. Connell and James Salter in her delicate, almost surgical ability to peel back the thin skin of normal life and to lay bare our painful truths, contradictions, the stains of grief and betrayal…a beautiful, haunting novel.”—A.M. Homes

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802191595
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mary-Beth Hughes is the author of the best selling novel, Wavemaker II, a New York Times Notable Book and the acclaimed collection Double Happiness which earned Hughes a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, and A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn and Rhinebeck, NY.

Editorial Reviews

04/20/2015
The latest from Hughes (Wavemaker II) begins just before Christmas 1969: the snow is coming down fast when Jean Devlin pulls out of her driveway and pauses in the quiet hush of the storm—in part because she can't see, but also to think and remember. The pages that follow set the tempo and sensibility for the rest of the novel, a patchwork of present and past, stitched together so seamlessly it can be unclear when one ends and another begins. This fluidity feels honestly captured and articulated, but a basic clarity is often sacrificed as a result. While Jean alludes to the pain of her past—a dead son, a wayward husband, and a beloved but unruly brother—she watches the snow and feels her solitude deepen. Hughes's novel is tender and sympathetic, but the cascade of familial references, and the snippets of memory that aren't fully explained or connected, never quite catch. As the book evolves and time moves along, through 1970 and into 1971, who, exactly, the characters are continues to feel too slippery, too subtle, too elusive. Despite the gorgeous precision of nearly every sentence (or perhaps because of it), the essential grounding of time and place feels obscured more often than not—like something in a snowstorm that's right there but can't quite be distinguished. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for THE LOVED ONES:

“Hughes’ prose is elusive, allusive, artful, intriguing... It’s as though Mickey Spillane sneaked into Virginia Woolf’s study to add some dialogue...there are marvels to behold.”—New York Times Book Review

"The elliptical narrative — rich in sensory detail...is a demanding read that rewards patience."—New York Times

"Bracing...Hughes is preternaturally alert to subtleties of appearance, gesture, and sensory detail.”—New Yorker

“Masterful... sexy, immersive and lushly written. Read with a sundress on—and a pair of Wayfarers.”—Oprah.com

“Mary-Beth Hughes's body of work casts a dreamy, hypnotic effect, even while slyly exposing the risks and rewards of love and its devastations among the upper class. Edith Wharton and Henry James own the mansion housing this slant of prose, all style and substance, and Hughes moves ever closer to such mastery with...The Loved Ones.”—Elle

"Emotionally raw but ultimately elegant... Like Jean Rhys, Hughes gives her reader only the barest of warnings before dropping them headlong into frenzy...Hughes brings the reader so close to each member of the Devlin family that when the faces come into view, we know the characters so well that their physical attributes seem beside the point...[a] brutal, lush, brittle tour of the upper echelons of midcentury family hell...The novel shares its nightmarish domestic sensibility with Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and its unsettling tone of constantly moving targets with the fiction of Renata Adler, but despite its 1970s setting and luxe-louche vibe, Hughes’s novel is archly contemporary in aim and style."—Bookforum

"A patchwork of present and past, stitched together so seamlessly...Hughes's novel is tender and sympathetic...gorgeous precision of nearly every sentence."—Publishers Weekly

"Mary Beth Hughes is a quietly devastating writer, reminiscent of Evan S. Connell and James Salter in her delicate almost surgical ability to peel back the thin skin of normal life and to lay bare our painful truths, contradictions, the stains of grief and betrayal. The Loved Ones is a beautiful haunting novel of a time, place and the Devlin family."—A.M. Homes

"An extraordinarily assured performance delivered in the quiet confidence and high style of a master of the form. The astonishing compression in the sentences quivers with that elusive quality of timeless art. Hughes' psychological acuity and unerring instincts as a dramatist combine with her tough-but-tender take on humanity to produce a work that will be read as long as any of us are alive—and far longer, if there is justice."—Matthew Thomas

"Compulsively readable, The Loved Ones is a beautiful book about the mystery of family, the suspense of growing up, and the ways in which women—young and old—make their peace with the world around them. Written with clockwork precision, Hughes’ portrait of the Devlins’ glamorous world—cosmetics fortunes! Baccarat tables! The Dorchester Hotel!—is a shimmering background for the dramas created by their conflicting desires, their colliding egos and their money. The story’s women—Jean, a gorgeous, classy bombshell and Lily her confused, yearning and loveable daughter—are both lost and found in this sea of privilege and desire."—Susan Cheever

"Mary Beth Hughes is a gorgeous writer. For years her masterly short stories have been passed among readers with an adoration and fervor that borders on religious. With The Loved Ones, the secret is out: the story of perfect swinging sixties scions Nick and Jean Devlin, their sprite of a daughter Lily and their mourned boy Cubbie, delves deeply beyond surfaces and eras, into the people we wish to be and the people we unfortunately are. Sly and immersive, sensual and wise, The Loved Ones firmly places Hughes alongside Paula Fox and Alice Munro."—Charles Bock

"A book about leavetaking is inevitably a book about returning. In Mary-Beth Hughes' new novel, departures of all kinds—by air, by ocean, by illness, by alienation, by death—lead the characters to circle one another as though in an entranced dance, looking for a safe place of arrival, hoping, perhaps, that their losses would feel less unbearable there. Hughes is a master of understatement, and deftly captures the subtle undercurrent of family life and the danger from the ever-changing world in the 1970s."—Yiyun Li

"In Mary-Beth Hughes’s electric novel The Loved Ones sexual currents surge as a bruised but glamorous couple strive to go on “making life gorgeous” after the death of their young son. Underhanded transactions and self-serving characters threaten these ambitions, and the privileged life in New York and London, late sixties, is not without its costs. Hughes writes with stunning economy: fully realized characters are made with a stroke in this most seductive, irresistible fiction."—Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends

Praise for DOUBLE HAPPINESS:

"Hughes is a quietly gorgeous writer, lavishing startling metaphors on her halflost souls. . . . [The] tone is often hushed, lending the collection a discreet, old-fashioned quality reminiscent of a restrained writer like Mavis Gallant. . . . Her stories begin like a train already in motion; the reader must trot to get a handhold and swing up. The elegant phrasing, the general hush, the condensation—all this contributes to a satisfying sense of intimacy . . . in this delicate, tender [collection].” —Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review

“The stories in this excellent collection meander with the sureness of streams discovering their paths. Hughes keeps her prose close to her characters’ thoughts, and doles out the most crucial information on the sly. . . . [Her] careful but unobtrusive organization gives even the saddest revelations—and most revelations here are sad—an air of the miraculous.”—The New Yorker

“[An] assured collection . . . [of] stylish, intricate stories about seemingly ordinary people . . . whose secrets, discoveries, longings, and subterfuges are anything but. [Hughes is] an emerging master of the form.” —Lisa Shea, Elle

“The reader eagerly waits for the hammer to fall in these eleven wickedly drawn stories. . . . Hughes’s characters are skillfully delineated modern types, caught off-guard and vulnerable . . . [by] surprising plot twists. . . . [An] intensely moving collection.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“These stories are devastating, poignant, desperate, and true.” —Mary Gaitskill

Praise for WAVEMAKER II:

“A writer of dexterity and imagination.”—NYTBR

“A novella that reads like an epic: part prison story, hospital-ward drama, family tragedy, and historial flight of fancy . . . [An] enigmatic and challenging debut.”—LAT

“A bone-chilling family drama . . . Hughes’s portrait of a weary, shell-shocked family is pitch perfect. . . . Succinct, intelligent, and completely unsentimental, Wavemaker II introduces a beautiful new voice in fiction.”—Time Out NY

“A spectacular splash.”—Vanity Fair

“[Wavemaker II] is, in all sense of the word, a composed work of fiction . . . elegantly constructed.”—The Washington Post

“The most important and surprising first novel I’ve read in years, full of subtlety and compassion and paradoxical empathy for a world-class scoundrel. Hughes’s elegant provocations get into you like a virus, and their traces kick around for a long time after.”—Rick Moody

“A brave and deeply moving first novel.”—Lorrie Moore

“A stunning first novel.”—Mindi Dickstein, St. Petersburg Times

“Subtly, cunningly, with a perfect instinct for the implicating detail, Mary-Beth Hughes has graphed the contours of the self-sabotaging human heart. Wavemaker II flashed forward relentlessly, every page peeling back further the mask of public power to expose the private corruptions of love. More a detonation than a debut.”—Sven Birkerts

“[Wavemaker II] is so ridiculously good that I’m sure to exhaust my supply of adjectives before I come close to expressing my admiration for it. . . . There is much to praise about Wavemaker II: its lovely spare prose, perfect pacing, details sharp and lethal as ice picks, and a handful of terrifying scenes into which Hughes writes so fearlessly that readers will be left wrung and stricken. Finally, though, what sets the novel apart is a raw power, an unselfconscious intensity and elegance, a rare breadth and depth of vision . . . sounds like genius to me.”—Darcy Cosper, Bookforum

“With insight and compassion, Hughes lays bare the Clemenses’ intricate dramas. . . . [An] artful first novel.”—Lisa Shea, O Magazine

“In her admirable debut novel, Wavemaker II, Mary-Beth Hughes stitches together a complex story of an unraveling family. . . . While the story line is full of daring shifts in point of view and authentic historical details, what holds the work together is the essential authority and music of the narrative voice. . . . It’s a grim and yet lyrically vivid period in this young family’s life, when nothing is going right, when the world is in league against them, and Hughes captures this with a wondrous array of sensual detail and a keen eye for the telling gestures of the crystallized percetopn.”—Fred Leebron, Ploughshares

“Highly original . . . [A] lyrical, poignant debut . . . in succinct, clipped sentences, Hughes relays intricate, heart-wrenching details . . . moving and vital.”—Publishers Weekly

“This first novel offers rich, nuanced characterizations ripe for book club discussion. Dozens of memorable scenes showcase Hughes’s eye for penetrating detail. . . . Highly recommended for all fiction collections.”—Library Journal

“In this glorious book about a glamorous, doomed family, Mary-Beth Hughes has taken a small, intricately knotted story from American history and unraveled it into a compelling narrative about the healing power of illness and the transcendence of the human spirit. . . . Hughes creates vivid scenes from the heart.”—Susan Cheever

“It takes a deft and sensitive writer to fill out the reality of such a story without being hobbled by the trueness of the characters and circumstances. . . . This novel evokes what a factual account of a life cannot bring us—the true beauty of human conflict, its tensions and releases, sensory assaults and pleasures, and the unconscious awkwardness and grace of it. For Mary-Beth Hughes, this is a truly impressive debut.”—Sarah Goodman, Bookpage

“I found it impossible to turn a page without being moved by this gorgeously written and deeply felt story of one father’s public act and its devastating personal ramifications. Wavemaker II’s complex message and its depiction of Roy Cohn are especially important now, when America is once again forced to make Gordian decisions about her civil liberties.”—Sheri Holman

“Wavemaker II comes out of a time when America was in one of its troubled childhoods, the years following Korea and preceding the hippies, when so many of us alive today were born, years which in retrospect appeare almost to have been made up of the stuff of this novel: cocktails, big spending, surprising sex, weird politics. This is a book full of that special brand of American hopefulness and optimism that ran people ragged. Mary-Beth Hughes has given us a novel that is mysterious, intelligent, elegant.”—Donald Antrim

From the Publisher

2015-03-21
Hughes (Double Happiness, 2010, etc.) follows a family reeling from the loss of a child through two disordered years in New Jersey and London. It's not just the death of 8-year-old Cubbie that's weighing on Nick, Jean, and Lily Devlin as the novel opens in 1969. Nick has been pressured by his manipulative, amoral brother, Lionel, to take a London-based job with volatile cosmetics tycoon Billy Byron, and Jean is unhappy about relocating to England from their home in Gooseneck Cove, a wedding present from her adored father that she's turned into a showcase. Eighth-grader Lily is struggling to master the intricacies of early-adolescent social interactions; her self-assurance isn't bolstered by the condescension of her mean-girl best friend, Margaret, and she displays an unfortunate weakness for boys who alternately entice and reject her. The first few chapters are a whirl of names and relationships that don't yet make a lot of sense, since Hughes is lavish with allusions and sparing with concrete information, which tends to arrive piecemeal. It's quickly clear, however, that Jean is fonder of her brother-in-law than she should be, even though Lionel has landed Nick into serious trouble before, and that Nick likes to indulge himself with intoxicants and extramarital sex, a tendency that will only worsen in London. The family dynamic is somewhat reminiscent of Hughes' previous novel, Wavemaker II (2001), as is the mood of lurking dread. Here, the withholding narrative style effectively induces in readers the same state of disorientation that envelops all three Devlins in London (whose business and social scenes are depicted as vicious and corrupt), but it also tends to alienate us from the characters. Final plot twists and long-delayed revelations back in the U.S. are shocking but delivered in an elliptical manner that muffles their emotional impact. No question about this author's gift for striking imagery and vivid scene-setting, but her characterizations could be deeper, and she might consider the possibility that atmosphere is not everything.

Kirkus Reviews