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Title: At Paradise Gate

Author: Jane Smiley

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-09-08

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 2 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

While her 77-year-old husband lies upstairs, dying, Anna Robison spends her depleting energy defending their home. Their three middle-aged daughters and 23-year-old granddaughter have invaded, radiating vigor and good intentions. But the younger women temper their help with squabbling, ill-considered advice, and an abundant supply of their own problems.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley brilliantly captures the simple pleasures and troubles common to everyday life.

Critic Reviews:

"Complex domestic tensions...honest, moving, quietly splendid." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Smiley's sharp insight, the homely use of details of family life, and the mysteries of marriage set this book apart....One to re-read with appreciationand pleasure." (The Fresno Bee)

"A wise and wonderful book, shot through with rare insight." (The Des Moines Register)

Members Reviews:

Five Stars

characters are quite well detailed.

The story of a family at a critical junction of their lives.

In At Paradise Gate Jane Smiley tells the story of the Robinson family. Ike is 77 and near death. He is attended by his wife, Anna, her three adult daughters, Helen, Claire and Susanna, and Helenâs daughter, Christine. Ike is staying in a bedroom upstairs but the daughters want him to move downstairs or at least have a nurse to attend to him, but he and Anna resist. The story continues with the family members engaging with each other in various ways.

Smiley is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres, a book I enjoyed, but I found this work to be depressing and too âtalkyâ and boring. Readers who appreciate family interactions may well enjoy it.

Literary merit trumps page-turning readability...in this case, anyway

On the surface, the storyline at the heart of this short, but stylistically dense novel is simple. It's the 1970s (as best as I can tell) and three middle-aged daughters (and one granddaughter) arrive at their old Iowa home to help their long-suffering mother, Anna Robison, care for their ailing yet still cantankerous father, Ike.

Each of the daughters has her own distinct personality and her own grievance against the other two. The granddaughter, a product of the women's liberation and flower power movement of the 60s, stands apart, on the opposite side of a seemingly unbridgeable generational divide from all three of her aunts. As a result of their irreconcilable differences, the well-meaning Robison girls are as much a bother to their already overburdened mother as they are a help, as much a curse as a blessing.

Over the course of a couple of days, all the old family animosities will bubble perilously close to the surface. And though long-accustomed to doing so, Anna is almost too exhausted to calm them. Instead she drifts in and out of a long reverie about her life, about her three daughters (and one granddaughter), and about her often troubled relationship with Ike, who, no one wants to admit, may very well be dying.

To give you some idea of the style of this novel think a combination of Proust and Austen, with a dash of Harold Pinter-style dialogue thrown in to add an impending ominous note to the overall family-dysfunction. Can't imagine such a mix? Neither could I, at least until I read this novel.