Still Life with Bread Crumbsby Anna Quindlen
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9781400065752
Publication Date: January 1, 2014
Pages: 252
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Random House
Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.
Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.
I vaguely remember buying this book at a used book shop, mostly because the cover was gorgeous and to a lesser extent, because I’d read Anna Quindlen’s book of essays How Reading Changed My Life and rationalised that there was an outside chance I might like her fiction too – but really, I bought it for the cover.
Last night, I read the synopsis – because it’s been so long since I bought it or looked at it again that I had no idea what it was about – and thought ‘Oh hey, this sounds interesting.’ I decided to try the first page, just to see if the writing was something that would hold my attention, and promptly read the first 5 chapters. It was a little sketchy at the start, because there’s a scene involving a racoon that I’d have preferred not to have read, and having lived through exactly the same scenario, I cry bullshit on the resolution, but it was a quick scene and not gratuitous.
Midway through though, I was having second thoughts. The writing is what I’m going to describe as ‘extreme third person POV’; an omniscient narrator who sometimes jumps from one person’s comments or thoughts about a character to asides that reveal what that other character was really thinking or doing or what was motivating them. It was both interesting, because the reader gets all the facts about what’s really going on beneath the surface, and jarring. One aside, set in a parenthetical, was over a page long. At this point it felt like speculative fiction, and I thought … 3 stars.
But then things started coming together, and by that I means the two main characters come together – and kudos to the author for turning the May/September dynamic on its ear without any equivocation. I didn’t care so much about the romance aspect, but it was at that point that so many divergent stories started to come together into something resembling coherence, and it made me want to stick with the story. I’m glad I did, because it ended up being an enjoyable story with a satisfactorily happy ending. I’m a fan of the device Quendlen used, where the end of the book jumps forward in time to give a quick summary of where everyone’s lives ended up; I like the sense of pleasant finality it imparts to the reader, even if it is unrealistic.
I’m not sure I’d read more of her work – but if I do run across any more of it, I’d definitely consider it.