Carol Edgarian’s astonishing and eagerly awaited second novel is a grand love story and a dazzling social chronicle of turbulent America during the financial collapse of 2008.
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, as they enter 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.
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Praise for Three Stages of Amazement
“A lovely, resonant novel. … This story feels universal. Not to mention generous and graceful and true.”
“Furiously compelling … a fiery, deeply involving book.”
“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.”
“It’s been seventeen years since Carol Edgarian’s bestselling, 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 true portraits of our era, or any era, appeared.”
“A brilliant and irresistible look at married life and happiness and the very human limitations of both. She’s a wonderful writer.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Surely you know Lena Rusch and Charlie Pepper: they’re the seemingly perfect fortyish 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 from 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.”
“Amazement is a rare book—one that can make you laugh, make you cry, and leave you thinking.”