Thanksgiving Night by Richard Bausch

Will Butterfield can't believe it. His 75-year-old mother, Holly, is drunk and threatening to jump off the roof. Again.\n\nHolly and Fiona, another elderly relative, won't stop tormenting Will and his wife Elizabeth with their bizarre (though often amusing) antics. Between Will's worries about his bookstore, The Heart's Ease, and Elizabeth's troublesome high school students, dealing with "the crazies" has become just too much.\n\nBut then something unexpected happens -- Henry Ward, a neighborhood handyman, meets the two old women, and he, his daughter Alison, and grandchildren are drawn into the Butterfields' lives in surprising ways. Both a comedy and a love story -- a first for Bausch -- Thanksgiving Night is about the real meaning of family, and one particular clan that has many reasons to be thankful.\n\nEditorial Reviews\n\nBausch's engagingly deranged characters hold our attention . . . in one of his more interesting and readable longer fictions." - Kirkus Reviews\n\n"Beautifully told. ... Bausch supplies plenty to go around, just as one would wish on any Thanksgiving night. " - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel\n\n"It's a subtle, slyly accomplished feat, and Bausch brings his disparate storylines together in a powerfully moving finale." - Richmond Times-Dispatch\n\n"Kooky relatives, drunken antics, and near-death experiences are fodder enough for three tomes. For this, we are thankful." - Entertainment Weekly\n\n"Bracing, unapologetically old-fashioned. Bausch's novel is also filled with sudden displays of emotion." - New York Times Book Review\n\n"(A) satisfying feast of a book that feels authentic and wise." - Washington Post Book World\n- From the Publisher\n\nIt's a subtle, slyly accomplished feat, and Bausch brings his disparate storylines together in a powerfully moving finale.\n- Richmond Times-Dispatch\n\nBeautifully told. ... Bausch supplies plenty to go around, just as one would wish on any Thanksgiving night. \n- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel\n\n(A) satisfying feast of a book that feels authentic and wise.\n- Washington Post Book World\n\nBracing, unapologetically old-fashioned. Bausch's novel is also filled with sudden displays of emotion.\n- New York Times Book Review\n\nKooky relatives, drunken antics, and near-death experiences are fodder enough for three tomes. For this, we are thankful.\n- Entertainment Weekly\n\nBausch consistently mixes good cheer and humor with longing and (on occasion) despair, sprinkling them all into this satisfying feast of a book that feels authentic and wise. Sure, it's clear that by the time this whole extended crew gathers at Thanksgiving most of their problems will have been resolved. But Bausch is such a companionable writer, and his characters so consistently genuine, that I never stopped turning the pages with enthusiasm, wonder and a delight in life's endless possibilities.\n- The Washington Post\n- Chris Bohjalian\n\nIn his new novel, Thanksgiving Night, Richard Bausch displays a bracing, unapologetically old-fashioned sensibilty. Using the time-honored tradition of putting a holiday in a strategic narrative position, he shows us the insular, byzantine world of a family and its assorted friends and neighbors in the fictional town of Point Royal, Va.\n\nOld-fashioned novelists tend to be generous, and Thanksgiving Night comes with broad swaths of detail, abundant quirks and lots of human suffering, as well as low-key lyricism. The actual story...somehow remains intact as the narrative shambles toward the Thanksgiving holiday.\n\nCould Bausch have been a bit more parsimonious? Could he have left out a few of the minor citizens of Point Royal? Probably. And if he'd done so, his book would have been just as satisfying. Then again, Thanksgiving Night doesn't suffer under the weight of its actual bounty. It's as if Bausch had set out to create the biggest dining table he could find, then put everyone he could think of around it.\n-The New York Times\n- Meg Wolitzer\n\nA house in Point Royal, Va., serves to entangle two families in clannish chaos. When local handyman Oliver Ward is summoned for a job at the house of Holly Grey and her aunt Fiona, he has no idea what to make of the two squabbling, headstrong old ladies who want to divide-literally-their house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The two are known as "the Crazies" by Holly's son, bookstore owner Will Butterfield, and his wife, high school teacher Elizabeth, who are growing weary of their antics. But they pay Oliver, who begins working at the ladies' house. Oliver's daughter, policewoman and single mother Alison, is later called in to help talk Holly off the roof during a drunken dispute. Meanwhile, Will's grown children, Mark and Gail, from his first marriage (to another Elizabeth, who abandoned the family) are in disagreement over whether they should hunt down their long-gone mother. There are digressions: Gail's sexual identity is an open question; Elizabeth's students are fractious; Will finds himself tempted by a sexy, none-too-stable bartender. When Oliver has a stroke on the job, the two families are thrown together at Holly and Fiona's as the Thanksgiving holiday draws nigh. Author of nine novels and five story collections, Bausch (Wives & Lovers) engages stock characters and a predictable theme of holiday forgiveness this time out, but he injects some crackle into the heartwarming elements. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\n\n- Publishers Weekly\n\nCaught in the middle of two pairs of warring relatives, middle-aged Will Butterfield feels helpless to control much of anything in his life. The "Crazies" are two old women who happen to be Will's mother and great-aunt. Their late-night calls, fueled by alcohol, give neither used-bookstore owner Will nor his much-younger second wife, Elizabeth, much rest. When the Crazies aren't tearing up his household, his adult children from his first marriage are. Still, Will and Elizabeth's solid, loving marriage weathers the squalls-that is, until Will allows himself to be seduced by his unstable neighbor, which destroys the fragile balance of everyone around him. In his tenth novel (after Hello to the Cannibals), Bausch elevates familial squabbling to an art form, offering a funny, tender look at a small group of small-town Virginians whose lives intersect, collide, and regroup around the 1999 Thanksgiving holiday. He turns enough fictional conventions on end to lure the reader deeper into the heart of his wounded characters, struggling for decency and forgiveness. Strongly recommended.-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\n\n- Library Journal\n\nThe interactions of several incomplete and varyingly dysfunctional Virginia families produce both sparks of contention and seeds of potential growth and change in Bausch's amiable tenth novel (Wives & Lovers, 2004, etc.). The setting is the town of Point Royal, described in an omniscient overview as an uneasy mixture of southern charm, quasi-aristocratic elegance and trendy crass commercialism. This is where middle-aged Will Butterfield runs The Heart's Ease bookstore and his second wife, Elizabeth, teaches high school-and where Will's now-adult children Gail and Mark grew up, then effectively fled from, after their mother (also named Elizabeth) had deserted her family, years earlier. It's 1999; specifically, the months leading up to "the last Thanksgiving of the century." But thankfulness is not unalloyed. Will's widowed mother, Holly Grey, lives in a rambling old house on Temporary Road, in a perpetual state of impending war with her aunt Fiona (her grandfather's "late-life child"-it's complicated), whose eccentricities peak, as it were, when she sends Holly to camp out on the roof of their home. Local carpenter Oliver Ward, a widower with an occasional drinking problem, first butts heads, then becomes best friends, with "the Crazies" (as Elizabeth and Will ruefully label Holly and Fiona). When Oliver is hospitalized following a mild stroke, his divorced policewoman daughter Alison makes nice with rootless handyman Stanley, while her sensitive teenager Jonathan eludes menacing schoolmates like the hulking underachiever (Calvin Reed), who's also harassing Elizabeth. Meanwhile, pastor John Fire (aka "Brother Fire") labors to aid these embattled souls, struggling to retain his waveringfaith and refrain from murdering a younger cleric, who writes hilariously bad devotional poetry. Then Will attracts the attention of sexpot bartender Ariana. . . . The book sounds like fun, and often is, despite shapeless dollops of overextended exposition and uncomfortably close echoes of Richard Russo's Pulitzer-winner, Empire Falls. Bausch's engagingly deranged characters hold our attention, and somehow muddle through, in one of his more interesting and readable longer fictions.\n\n- Kirkus Reviews