Carol Edgarian's astonishing and eagerly awaited second novel is a grand love story and a dazzling social chronicle of turbulent America today.
Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch live in San Francisco in a modest pink bungalow they cannot afford. On the hill above them sit the great houses of the rich, with their servants and gardens and glorious views of the bay. Charlie and Lena grew up believing they could have it all — sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. Now, in early middle age, life has delivered surprises and tests—a stillborn twin, an economic crash, a ruthless rival in Charlie’s business, and a seductive lover from Lena’s past.
Touched by tragedy, imbued with hope, Lena and Charlie must face, for the first time, real limitations. Charlie works constantly, pursuing a revolutionary advance in medicine; Lena totters, missing work deadlines while taking care of the kids – Willa, the delicate surviving twin, and Theo, a precocious four year old who understands more of adult life than he should.
Looming over Lena and Charlie in one of the grandest houses on the hill live Lena’s estranged relatives, Cal and Ivy Rusch. Cal, a formidable Silicon Valley titan, complicates and manipulates the lives of everyone around him; Ivy, every bit his match, gives their ruthless wealth its enviable patina and charm. But when unexpected adversity descends upon Cal and Ivy’s privileged lives, Lena must navigate her family’s secrets and betrayals. Her quest for grace is the pulse of this superb novel.
Bracingly intelligent, profoundly humane, written in gorgeous prose, Three Stages of Amazement is a spellbinding journey across a landscape of national unease – our own – when the fragility of one marriage reflects the tenuous state of the American Dream. Hailed as a “prodigious talent,” Edgarian delivers a stunning thriller of the heart— about confronting adversity, gaining wisdom, and finding great love.
"In this gorgeously written, haunting and often hilarious novel, Carol Edgarian conjures a particular moment in America's recent history and unleashes within it a collision of universal forces: love, desire, ambition, loyalty. I can't think of a book that more viscerally evokes the gritty challenge-and casual heroism-of motherhood and marriage."
—JENNIFER EGAN, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad
"Both an epic love story and a reflection of social anthropology in America today, Three Stages of Amazement is a gracefully rendered narrative of the inevitable joys and heartaches we face in adulthood....Edgarian’s sharp, beautiful prose captures the essence of the human condition in all its pain and glory..." —The Daily Beast, March 10, 2011
"It's been 17 years since Carol Edgarian's best-selling, critically acclaimed first novel, "Rise the Euphrates," announced the arrival of a gifted and ambitious young writer. Yet that long pause feels right when you read "Three Stages of Amazement," her rueful, wholly adult novel." —WASHINGTON POST READ MORE
"In what may well be the most serious and the most entertaining domestic novel of the year, San Francisco writer Carol Edgarian delivers a new turn on Tolstoy's old chestnut: "Happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." She calls her book Three Stages of Amazement and sets it in San Francisco toward the end of the "dot com" craze. We meet Lena Rusch, an appealing but harried mother of two whose surgeon husband has been trying, with middling success, to found his own medical device company. The novel deftly dramatizes questions about the essence of married life and throws in a mystery about Lena's origins for good measure. But there's no mystery as to how Edgarian keeps us going — deep insight into human behavior, coupled with the right language to describe it." —Alan Cheuse, "Better Summer Reads" on NPR's ALL THINGS CONSDIERED
"Amazement" is a rare book -- one that can make you laugh, make you cry, and leave you thinking." —SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
"Set in San Francisco, this rich book by Carol Edgarian evokes all the promise inveterate readers invest in the word "novel." Portraying the "post-blush" of love in a marriage weathered by financial crisis, grief, and the humblings of middle age, Edgarian animates real characters and identifiable lives with uncommon generosity. — Barnes and Noble Review
"Carol Edgarian's novel is a book about grown-ups for grown-ups. Given that we never really grow up, yet have to make our way in the world, it ends up being thought provoking, intelligent, wise, sad, and illuminating. If that makes it sound too lofty, it's not: it's humane and therefore sometimes funny, and it nails the complexities of adulthood with a steel hammer held gently in very capable hands."
—ANN BEATTIE, author of Walks with Men and Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories
Three Stages of Amazement is one of those books you read in a great rush and then buy for all of your friends—a big, generous novel that reminds us why living inside a novel for a few days is still and always will be one of the great human experiences.
—ANN PACKER, author of Dive From Clausen Pier and Swim Back To Me
"Love, family, marriage, illness and money--this is a life story and a love story for our era, beautifully observed, sharply etched by a master storyteller."
—AMY BLOOM, author of Away and Where the God of Love Hangs Out
"In Three Stages of Amazement, Carol Edgarian gives you a brilliant and irresistible look at married life and happiness and the very human limitations of both. She's a wonderful writer."
—JAMES SALTER, author of Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime
“The Best and the Brightest—Good People Make All the Right Moves. And still, things fall apart.”
Surely you know Lena Rusch and Charlie Pepper: They’re the seemingly perfect 40-ish Bay Area couple, the ones with the nice house, the cute kid, the interesting careers—and the fun sex life, thanks to the “bells and whistles: we’re told Charlie provides in bed. Lena and Charlie are so familiar, so knowable, that it’s sometimes hard to remember they’re fictional characters at the center of a lovely, resonant novel, Three Stages of Amazement (Scribner), by Narrative magazine editor Carol Edgarian. So guess what? The Rusch-Pepper union turns out to be not so perfect after all, but not for any big, topical reason—okay, Charlie, a doctor, is having trouble getting funding for his latest medical invention and Lena has lately been hearing form her dashing, successful ex-boyfriend—but because, well, marriage, and life, are just plain complicated. Edgarian’s plot—about Lena’s rich old venture capitalist uncle out to interfere with (or is it to help?) Charlie’s business—is unique; but everything else in this story (the way long-married people talk, the conflicted emotions we have for family) feels universal. Not to mention generous and graceful and true.
—SARA NELSON, O Magazine, March 2011
"Holy shit is this a beautiful book....If you want a novel which’ll have you caring and believing and breathing deep and hard because of what happens to the folks therein, you’ve now found what you’ve been looking for." Weston Cutter, Corduroy Books http://corduroybooks.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/four-quicks/
“It’s a great heart in a great author who loves the villains in a story while fully imbuing the heroes with human flaws and hungers… Seldom have such a true portraits of our era, or any era, appeared.”
—RICK BASS, author of Where the Sea Used to Be and Why I Came West
The modern marriage has two states, plateau and precipice, and in the winter of our recent crisis—with markets plummeting and even rich folks crying poor; with the dark reign of one tinsel president finally ending, and the promised hope of a new man about to start; yes, with hope rising like a cockamamie kite and fear more common than love—Charlie Pepper forgot his wife.
He didn’t mean to. That much Lena knew. She paused at the kitchen sink on New Year’s Eve morning, the last day of the lousiest year of their lives, and considered what she needed and what she knew. The crab needed to come out of the fridge, at some point. What about butter? She’d forgotten candles. She needed another bag of ice. It had been a year since they’d even thought about a dinner. Since then the world fell down one black hole and she and Charlie fell down another; as yet no one had come back. But Obama was taking over in twenty days and Lena had hope. She also had a sick baby and no lettuce. And if years ago Lena and Charlie promised that their hearts would always be in synch, well, it was a fool’s promise, wasn’t it? For now their hearts were a cacophony of chuffing and banging, with Charlie’s motor driving like a great battleship and hers a bubbling alchemist’s pot. Then there were the children’s hearts: Theo’s drum sounded like quick boots pounding up the stairs, while Willa’s was more skittish, the flap-flap of gossamer wings. And there was a third heart so silent it took away sound.
“Usted esta mutada en el burro, tiene que seguir,” Glo called, on her way out the door after tending Willa half the night so Lena could sleep. “You’re on the burro, you might as well go.”
“Entiendo que el burro es fuerte.” Lena replied, hoisting the baby onto her shoulder. “Ahora porque no puede el tener un par adicional de manos?” The burro is strong, now why can’t he have an extra pair of hands?
Glo chuckled, her girlish brown fingers covering her mouth. Seven years ago, Glo crossed the border at night led by a coyote, leaving her two kids and her mother behind in Guatemala. Every Sunday Glo called home, and sometimes her youngest, Rosella, refused to speak to her. Yet here she was talking of Lena’s burros. It was life, this crazy life, and if you didn’t laugh it broke you. It broke you anyway, but it was better if you laughed.
All day Lena made lists and as she carried Willa up the stairs she started a new one. Butter, candles, ice. If, while working feverishly, Charlie forgot her and the kids, it was never for long. He forgot them repeatedly, at moments, across days, in time. Lena, five years younger but dog-aged in matters of love, likewise misplaced Charlie, with the all worry and push she had to nudge up the road. I ought to write it down: butter, candles, ice, she thought, when Willa started coughing again. Lena ran. Charlie was forty-seven, she was forty-two. They had five years between them and eight years of marriage to their backs and to say they were committed was to say they were in deep.
Yet they missed each other.
And Lena wanted—oh, she wanted—to be pressed deep inside her bones. But Charlie was elsewhere—it might be Uganda, or Boston, or an hour south in the office, or asleep in the bed beside her. Dear Charlie, grinding his jaw.
“Theo,” Lena called, grabbing the newspaper as she pushed down the hall on her heels. “I’ll have the door closed. Come find me, honey. Don’t shout.”
She kicked the bathroom door shut and flipped on the shower. As it roared to life, Lena whispered into Willa’s tiny ear, “That’s it, breathe.”Willa, ten months old, weighed just eleven pounds. In her short life she had been to the hospital a dozen times. With pneumonia, seizures, surgeries, not to mention those four months at the start. The doctors talked gravely of cognitive delays, and worse. Cerebral palsy was a phrase sometimes used. Lena stopped her ears. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe, it was that believing only took her so far. What Willa needed, Lena felt sure, was time. Lena’s job was to seize time.
As the steam built, Lena first stripped Willa to her diaper then peeled off her sweats down to her panties. Making a bed of towels on the tiled floor, she sat—for the first time all morning—with her knees bent, her back against the wall, showing the cabinets her real face, the face she let no one seeLena Rusch was irreverent, good looking, plucky. She had a fine if exhausted brain. This meant she couldn’t always recall the lists she made, or the ends and even the middles of her sentences, but she always started out with a bang. She was romantic and, worse, an optimist. Fate had forced her to be practical and stolid, too. The two sides rubbed. She was crazy for her children, her friends, chocolate, and news of any kind. She might be crazy for Charlie, too, if she came across him in the daylight once in a while. In other words, Lena Rusch was extraordinarily ordinary: she worked and reared and hardly slept; she began each day prepared for a surprise.
Preemies did best skin to skin. Lena laid Willa’s bare chest like a cloth across her own, and making sure her baby was upright with the world, she gently drummed on the tiny back. Willa moaned, burrowing her face in the cave of Lena’s neck. “Sweetheart,” Lena murmured. “Come on, come on.”
“There you are!” Jesse cried, throwing open the door. They were sisters, and though Jesse was much, much younger, they entered rooms as their mother had taught them, like a storm. “I’ve been shouting a lung out downstairs. Theo finally—“
“Shut the door, you noodle! You’re letting out the steam!”
Jesse did as she was told. But between the blasting shower and the stifling heat, she wouldn’t stay long. “What? Is she sick again?” Jesse folded her arms. “Poor pup. Poor you.”
“Nah. We’re fine.”
Technically they were only half sisters. Jesse, sixteen years Lena’s junior, was the product of a love affair their mother had, one of many, after Lena’s father died. She was as long limbed and blonde as Lena was curvy and dark. Their mother told everyone that Jesse was helping out with the children until she found a job, but Jesse was a child herself.
“So. What are you wearing tonight?” she asked.
Lena tipped her head against the wall and laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Wear your green dress,” Jesse advised seriously. “It’s about time. And how ‘bout I wear your black?”
“Cheeky, girl!”
“Am not!”
“Oh, yes.” Lena smiled wistfully. It wasn’t so long ago (in truth, it felt like a minute) that Lena was the one flying out the door to get wasted at high school parties while little Jesse flapped her hands from her bouncy seat. And while that was long ago, Jesse still manipulated like a child—openly, as if she were the only one playing for keeps. Sighing, Lena rubbed circles in Willa’s back. “I gave the black dress to Glo.”
“You what? You gave it to the nanny?”
“Not nanny. Glo.”
“Christ, Lean.”
Truthfully, Lena would have given Gloria Angelica Cardenas anything—anything—for Glo saved Lena’s sanity every single day. And besides, the rapture on Glo’s face when Lena handed her the box was worth a hundred, maybe a thousand black dresses. Lena looked up at Jesse, deciding if she should take the trouble to explain. But Jesse was looking at herself in the mirror, continuing that frank, daily conversation women have with their faces. “Ugh. New Year’s Eve and no guy. I hate my life!”
“Fa.”
Jesse turned. “Okay, Miss Veteran. When. When is he going to show up?”
Lena’s grinned slyly. “They always do.” At last Willa coughed, good and wet. It was enough. Jesse escaped, slamming the door behind her, as Lena put Willa to her breast. They would be there an hour. With one arm hooked under the baby, Lena spread the newspaper across her knees, where the steamy ink would stain her black. She didn’t care. This was the moment she’d been waiting for—">her reward being four full pages in the Times on Bernie Madoff and his colossal Ponzi scheme. Lena was in awe of Madoff, who, by promising steady returns of eighteen percent, had perpetrated the largest stock fraud in history. He’d swindled at every level, from the Wall Street fat cats, to relatives, to Palm Beach society, to grieving Jewish widows, to the mistress who claimed he had a small penis, to Mort Zuckerman, the media titan, to Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor, to Zsa Zsa Gabor. Yet in the photo on the front page Madoff showed no remorse. He walked the streets, a Jew with a George Washington haircut; he smiled like a shark for the paparazzi.
