Staying True
By Jenny Sanford
Ballantine, $25
I believe it was my mother who first admonished me never to presume that "you know what really goes on in another person's marriage."
Well, Mom, meet the Sanfords of South Carolina, whose odd and tumultuous union is now an open book, thanks to "Staying True," Jenny Sanford's memoir of a marriage that only can be described as the Contract With America meets Southern gothic.
Sanford's husband, Mark -- the governor of South Carolina -- was once a rising star in the national Republican firmament. Then, last June, he disappeared from office for nearly a week, ostensibly to go "hiking on the Appalachian Trail." As it turned out, he was in South America for a tryst with his Argentine mistress. Gov. Sanford's confessional television interviews didn't help matters, and this book, for all its more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, seems intended as the last nail in the coffin.
The former first lady, a one-time investment banker with Lazard Freres, is smart, focused and very angry. For all the pious references to forgiveness stitched throughout the narrative, revenge is a barely concealed subtext.
Sanford spends a great deal of time describing her heroic efforts to accommodate what she repeatedly calls her husband's "frugality." If this guy is frugal, the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge was thrifty. Consider this anecdote: Never good about presents -- early in their marriage he gave her "half" a used bicycle -- and momentarily remorseful for all the time he was spending away from his family while serving in Washington as a congressman, he had an aide buy a diamond necklace and hide it in the family home.
On the morning of his wife's birthday, he faxed clues so she could have "a treasure hunt." She was overjoyed when she found the necklace and wore it to dinner when he returned home. "That is what I spent all that money on?" he said. "I hope you kept the box."
According to Sanford's account, "He returned the necklace the next day, thinking it was not worth the money he had spent."
What's never clear from her extended exercise in score-settling is why? The man she describes is driven, self-absorbed, pathologically cheap and 360-degrees weird. She runs his political campaigns, puts up with his habitual absences and bears him four sons.
She even believes him when late in their marriage he explains an unexpected trip alone to New York by saying he needs respite from the extra stress he is feeling because the hair on the top of his head is thinning. If you believe that, you'll also believe Sanford really was looking for family property records when she ransacked her husband's desk while he was away and found the file with his love letters.
On the other hand, this guy's self-absorption appears so complete that he demanded his wife's permission to continue seeing his mistress because it was the first thing he'd ever done for himself.
Eight days after her husband's affair came to light, Sanford took legal steps to turn her own name into a trademark. According to U.S. Patent and Trademark records, she applied to legally designate her name as a "good or service."
A merchandise trademark, a book with inspirational potential tailor-made for the lucrative evangelical speaking circuit, a network interview with Barbara Walters. Not a bad launch for the woman-scorned brand.
--Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times
Bloodroot
By Amy Greene
Knopf, $24.95
"I didn't see nothing wrong with John Odom at first, but even if I'd seen that snake coiled up inside his heart I wouldn't have tried to stop her."
The warning of tragedy to come is on the first page of Amy Greene's debut novel "Bloodroot." The speaker, an old woman named Byrdie who lives alone on a mountain, is introducing the story of her granddaughter Myra. The girl who is hypnotized by John Odom's physical beauty then ruined by his cruelty is the character at the heart of the book. It's a tale descended from "Wuthering Heights," in which desire for a person and obsession with a place warp and confound a sensitive nature.
The place here is the beautiful, sometimes treacherous Bloodroot Mountain, where Myra roams freely among a trio of families who form a tiny, isolated community. It's a place where the natural and the supernatural intersect, where curses and spells are cast without skepticism and a person seals her romantic fate by swallowing an animal's heart.
Greene, who grew up in the Appalachian foothills of Tennessee, creates this magic world with the assurance of a native. It's a place where jealousy becomes palpable: "All the way up the mountain a storm raged in me, until somehow I made it manifest in the world outside," says one of Myra's unfortunate admirers. "By the time I reached the place where Myra's rock jutted high over a bluff the wind blew so hard that all I could hear was its screaming whistle."
Greene traverses four generations in "Bloodroot," telling anecdotes of tragic loves through characters' monologues, a device that harks back to William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." The grandmother and the childhood friend, Myra, and Myra's twins supply the narrative in voices that confidently echo the Appalachian dialect. There are irresistibly gothic elements to the tale -- the child of the mountain finds herself the virtual prisoner of her husband's crude and violent family in town -- and the violent conclusion to Myra's marriage is not nearly the end of the story.
--Peggy Burch, The Commercial Appeal
The Three Weismanns of Westport
By Cathleen Schine
Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux $25
One hundred ninety-three years after her death, Jane Austen is still generating books -- it's just that now the books are written by other people. None is better suited to the challenge than Cathleen Schine, whose clever highbrow chick lit ("The New Yorkers," "The Love Letter") has long reminded people of Austen.
In "The Three Weissmanns of Westport," Schine takes her cue directly from "Sense and Sensibility," transplanting the reasonable sister, the drama-queen sister, their dear mama and all their troubles with love and money to contemporary Connecticut. The operation is a success -- the story is fun to read, and the twists and updates on the original add a layer of mischief.
The trouble starts when 75-year-old Joseph Weissmann abandons his wife, Betty, for a conniving woman in his office named Felicity Barrow. Joseph evicts his spouse from their Central Park West apartment, and Betty moves to a beach cottage in Westport offered by her magnanimous Cousin Lou. Betty's daughters, who have separately fallen into desperate financial straits, join her.
The older one, Annie, is "Sense" -- a librarian who could have been an accountant, secretly pining for the famous author with whom she had a magical one-night stand. Will you be surprised, reader, when I tell you he is Felicity Barrow's brother and comes with annoying adult children and dopey groupies? The younger daughter, Miranda, is "Sensibility" -- a literary agent whose high-profile memoirist clients have dragged her all the way to Oprah with their lies.
The sharp-edged satire and the lowdown slapstick of the book act as a foil for its warm emotional center, the relationship between Betty and her daughters. Annie's continual worry over Miranda, whose impulsivity leads her into a pathetic cougar situation with a fey young actor, feels very real. Perhaps especially to this reviewer, who is the object of similar romantic watchdogging from her own sibling. Is every pair of sisters Sense and Sensibility? I guess that's what gives the idea legs.
-- Marion Winik, Newsday
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