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Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth (2006, Paperback)
US $9.99
ApproximatelyAU $15.32
Condition:
Very good
A book that does not look new and has been read but is in excellent condition. No obvious damage to the cover, with the dust jacket (if applicable) included for hard covers. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, and no underlining/highlighting of text or writing in the margins. May be very minimal identifying marks on the inside cover. Very minimal wear and tear. See the seller’s listing for full details and description of any imperfections.
- Buy It NowPinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth (2006, Paperback)
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Located in: Independence, Kansas, United States
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Estimated between Thu, 14 Aug and Wed, 20 Aug to 94104
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eBay item number:276544922134
Item specifics
- Condition
- ISBN
- 9780156031868
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
ISBN-10
0156031868
ISBN-13
9780156031868
eBay Product ID (ePID)
48646841
Product Key Features
Book Title
Pinkerton's Sister
Number of Pages
752 Pages
Language
English
Topic
Psychological, Contemporary Women, Historical
Publication Year
2006
Genre
Fiction
Format
Perfect
Dimensions
Item Height
0 in
Item Weight
26.5 Oz
Item Length
8 in
Item Width
5.3 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2005-031618
Dewey Edition
22
Reviews
PRAISE FOR PINKERTON'S SISTER "Rushforth's second novel is set in Edwardian New York and takes place on a single day, largely in the avid mind of its heroine, Alice Pinkerton. Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre, she passes her days devising ways to expose 'the humorless of Longfellow Park.' An epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life."- THE NEW YORKER "Pinkerton's Sister is a very fine novel, at once sprawling and intimate, and blessed with long gorgeous passages worthy of Henry James." -THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD, Within the bounds of realism, a more fantastic or original novel than Peter Rushforth's Pinkerton's Sister would be hard to imagine. Alice Pinkerton is a New York spinster of 1905, raised to join the middle-class matrons in her respectable, status-conscious neighborhood, but cursed from childhood with the gift of seeing through humbug. Her ecstatic immersion in English literature has only made things worse, so that by the age of 30, she is too clever, quirky, and dark-mustached to be anything but an object of scorn in the eyes of her peers. When not submitting to her psychologist's latest enthusiasms (she suffers his passing fancies for phrenology, massage, hot water immersion, cold water immersion, dream interpretation, cloud reading, and hypnosis) Alice occupies herself with word games and arabesques, indulging in lengthy fantasies of gender-reversal, spontaneous ballet, and other embarrassments for the doctors, clergymen, merchants, and matrons who patrol the social boundaries that keep bluestockings like Alice locked away as "madwomen," rather than writing and selling books.There's very little in the way of plot in Rushforth's second novel (the first, Kindergarten, appeared to acclaim about 25 years ago), except for the piecemeal recollection of her childhood friendship with a black servant named Annie. Not much older than Alice herself, Annie was a worthy playmate who tried to protect Alice from her father and the never-spelled-out abuses he and a friend inflicted on them both. Alice's hatred of her father burns even hotter than her love of Annie, and she remains convinced he was responsible for Annie¹s disappearance and probable death. These passions--and a handful of other childhood memories--hold together an otherwise loose, disorderly sequence of satirical jokes and verbal flourishes and sometimes overly long frolics. Don't expect the rustling skirts and repressed emotions of a Merchant Ivory film. Pinkerton's Sister reads like an absinthe-fueled, all-night collaboration between Edith Wharton, Angela Carter, and Monty Python., Rushforth's pyrotechnic second novel (appearing 25 years after the publication of his acclaimed debut, Kindergarten) seeks to capture, in one day, the play of forces-literary, musical, medical and sexual-that made Edwardian New York society. At the center is Alice Pinkerton, nearly 35-year-old "spinster," the "madwoman in the attic" of Longfellow Park. Actually, she is not confined to an attic: she writes, goes to church and takes care of her mother. But these details are almost hidden in the deluge of Alice's inner life flowing over these pages, with a richness comparable to Leopold Bloom's in Ulysses. Alice, it appears, suffers from hypertrophy of childhood memories and a consequent emotional vacancy of adult experience. Does it stem from her discovery, at 20, of the body of her father, who committed suicide in his study? Perhaps the real key to Alice's condition goes back to twinned mysteries: the disappearance of her beloved childhood maid, and the source of her hatred for her father. Alice's fantasies and musings are stuffed with references to Shakespeare, 19th-century novels and poetry (particularly Stevenson's The Children's Hour, which exerts a surprisingly sinister influence in her life), opera and popular music; these are both buffers against reality and a means of mythologizing her neighbors. The flaw is that Rushforth has created no character in the book to counterbalance Alice; you sometimes feel that, in this mansion of a novel, you are locked in a small crowded closet. , PRAISE FOR PINKERTON'S SISTER "Rushforth's second novel is set in Edwardian New York and takes place on a single day, largely in the avid mind of its heroine, Alice Pinkerton. Something of a cross between Harriet the Spy and Jane Eyre, she passes her days devising ways to expose 'the humorless of Longfellow Park.' An epic inquiry into literature's role as an engine of interior life."-THE NEW YORKER "Pinkerton's Sister is a very fine novel, at once sprawling and intimate, and blessed with long gorgeous passages worthy of Henry James."-THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Dewey Decimal
823/.914
Synopsis
Trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, Alice Pinkerton has turned to the liberating worlds she finds in literature. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life; she wears only white, has a stutter, and knows her peers call her a madwoman in the attic. Various period cures-hydrotherapy, hypnotherapy, electrotherapy, a sanitarium-fail to turn this thirty-two-year-old, highly imaginative, caustically funny woman into one of the silly damsels of 1903's New York Society. Hauntingly, beneath all this lies a dark family secret. Pinkerton's Sister is a novel for readers, who will thrill to recognize a kindred in Alice's references to our most beloved literary characters: Jo March, Jane Eyre, Leo Bloom, and Hester Prynne, among many others, grace these pages. This intertextual, playful work certainly qualifies as "the ultimate book-geek's guilty pleasure" (Creative Loafing Atlanta)., It's turn of the century New York, a city bursting with new life as the old century's order makes way for the mercantile class. But in the Pinkerton household a 19th-century embarrassment remains: Alice Pinkerton--considered by neighbors as the "madwoman in the attic."
LC Classification Number
PR6068.U76P56 2006
Item description from the seller
Seller feedback (698)
- 1***a (163)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseGreat value, packing was top notch, as described. Arrived on timeVampire Chronicles Ser.: The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice (1998, Hardcover) (#276540163342)
- 5***o (122)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseExactly as listed. Great condition. Great seller! Thanks!
- 4***r (42)- Feedback left by buyer.Past yearVerified purchasePackaged well and received on time. Thank you!Vampire Chronicles Ser.: The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice (1998, Hardcover) (#276540163342)
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Seller feedback (698)
- 1***a (163)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseGreat value, packing was top notch, as described. Arrived on timeVampire Chronicles Ser.: The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice (1998, Hardcover) (#276540163342)
- 5***o (122)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseExactly as listed. Great condition. Great seller! Thanks!
- 4***r (42)- Feedback left by buyer.Past yearVerified purchasePackaged well and received on time. Thank you!Vampire Chronicles Ser.: The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice (1998, Hardcover) (#276540163342)