In Elizabeth Nunez's latest novel, conflicts arise in apparently tranquil and satisfying lives. Justin Peters, a black Trinidadian with a Harvard Ph.D., has chosen to teach at a small public college in Brooklyn; though he dislikes the extreme Afrocentrism of certain of his colleagues, he manages to survive through some deft maneuvering between the canons. His wife loves him, their 4-year-old daughter, Giselle, and her work at a primary school, but something isn't right. She used to write poems before they met, but now Justin sees her as mired in self-help books and talk shows. ''Are you living exactly where you want to be, Sally?'' he asks. ''Are you doing exactly what you want to do?'' Her inexplicable coldness makes him think she plans to leave him, perhaps for her friend Anna. Meanwhile, his prize student tries to kill himself after discovering that his girlfriend has been seduced by someone he describes as a ''lesbo.'' An important theme in Grace is the defense of the Western classics; diversity, Justin believes, must cast a wider net. He plans to compare Toni Morrison's Sethe, who killed her daughter, to Euripides' Medea, whose motives for killing her children are at least as tangled. After much debate, the curriculum committee approves this line of reasoning. Sally and Justin eventually come to an understanding as well, which might be more believable if he sounded less like a stage parent and more like a friend. — William Ferguson
Grace
Narrated by Elizabeth Nunez
Elizabeth NunezUnabridged — 7 hours, 48 minutes
Grace
Narrated by Elizabeth Nunez
Elizabeth NunezUnabridged — 7 hours, 48 minutes
Overview
Trinidad-born Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated literature professor whose focus on the works of “Dead White Men” receives little professional respect at the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, is no longer certain about their life together. Once a poet, now a teacher and nearly forty, Harlem-born Sally wants something more. If Sally and Justin's union is to survive (along with four-year-old daughter Giselle), both must face the crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and alter their future.
Editorial Reviews
Nunez's latest (after Discretion) is a perceptive and moving tale of an African-American middle-class marriage struggling to right itself amid tremors of self-discovery. Both Justin Peters, a professor of literature at a college in Brooklyn, and his wife, Sally, a primary school teacher, have sacrificed a great deal in making their way in white America. Justin, a Trinidadian Harvard graduate, adheres fiercely to the "Dead White Men" of the classical canon, despite his college's party line of Afrocentricity. Sally, whose father was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, abandoned her ambitions to be a poet after the violent death of her former lover. Yet their comfortable life with their four-year-old daughter, Giselle, is not enough for Sally, who informs Justin that she needs "space" and moves in with her best friend. Bewildered by and critical of what he sees as Sally's feminist platitudes, Justin suspects lesbianism, seeing a parallel with his own troubled student, Mark, who discovers that his girlfriend is sleeping with her white female professor. Sally's inability to articulate what she lacks feeds Justin's feelings of helplessness, underscored by a colleague's accusations of Uncle Tomism. In exquisitely tuned prose, Nunez depicts a man's lonely attempt to save his marriage while honoring his roots. Adopting Justin's sage, reasoned point of view tempered by the Great Books he teaches, Nunez allows the narrative to unfold with understated elegance. Although Sally's existential struggle often seems unfocused and simplistic, Justin must learn to reacquaint himself with the woman he loves. As in most of life, there is no shattering epiphany here but, rather, a subtly shaded landscape, at once familiar and pitted with hidden challenges. Agent, Ivy Fischer Stone. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
The title of this lyrical novel could not be more fitting. Nunez (Bruised Hibiscus) is one of the most graceful novelists in recent memory. Her descriptions-of Brooklyn apartments, teaching in a small college, the African American character and its subtleties, aging, marriage, the life of a four-year-old, life in Jamaica, and immigration to the United States-seem right on target. Very little "happens" here and yet at least four lives are drastically changed by the end. The action is moderated, the pace slow, which makes many audiobooks difficult to listen to, but the lush settings here render it as absorbing as listening to a fine concerto. Half a dozen conclusions seem predictable, yet Nunez opts for none of them. Her voice, with a distinct Jamaican accent, at first seems at odds with Sally, her main female character, the tough African American woman raised in Harlem, but after a moment it meshes with Justin's voice, creating a bond between husband and wife that enhances the experience of the recording. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Love grows cold during a Brooklyn winter, in an equally chilly tale from Nunez. College professor Justin Peters, Trinidian-born, suspects his wife Sally is cheating on him-or will be as soon as she gets a chance, though he has nothing to go on besides Sally's evident unhappiness. They live well enough, with their young daughter Giselle, yet Sally, who grew up in Harlem, longs for the freedom of her youth, when she was a brilliant student at Hunter High School in Manhattan and then at Howard University, writing passionate poetry, expected to do great things. Now that life has dwindled down to teaching elementary school and caring for Giselle. Sally frets that she has nothing useful to do. Her life seems meaningless, especially compared to that of her father, a courageous doctor murdered by a racist mob down south. Her brother Tony, then seven, witnessed the killing and grew up a drug addict. Her mother ended up in a mental institution And sometimes Sally isn't sure she herself is all that together. Justin doesn't quite understand, but he's beset with midlife worries of his own. What if Sally does leave him? He vows silently that he'll never let her take their daughter, though his Trinidadian mother has told him that a child needs a mother more than a father. He still feels like a black man in a white man's world, despite his Harvard education and impeccable reputation in the academic community. He does his damnedest to convey his own passion for classic European literature to a multicultural student body that thinks of these authors as Old Dead White Men with nothing to say. A departmental scandal is brewing: a hard-line feminist professor's clandestine affair with a female student. Thisonly adds to Justin's concern: Perhaps Sally will fall in love with a woman, not a man. Long talks follow; nothing much changes. Muted, somewhat anemic, minus the florid excesses of Nunez's previous four (Discretion, 2001, etc.).
"Grace speaks to our propensity for self-delusion that cripples our relationship with ourselves and with those we profess to care deeply about."
"An exquisite love story . . . Once again, accomplished author Elizabeth Nunez lends readers her remarkable voice in this masterfully crafted story."
"Extremely deserving of its title, this gorgeous, meditative book is a graceful rendering of one couple’s journeys and explorations toward and away from each other. A moving love story, it shows us how a deferred dream can erode a marriage and how grace can sometimes put us to the test, even as it redeems."
"Nunez is able to write the interior monologue of a changing mind, to show grace at work in the human heart."
Sally Peters's unhappiness with the state of her life and her need to find more meaning in living cause her husband to examine his own attitudes toward marriage. Their search for a way to accommodate each other leads them both into their pasts. Elizabeth Nunez reads her own prose. Her colorful West Indies accent overcomes the locale of the book, which is set in Brooklyn, but the tenor of the story is lost in the sameness of the word sounds. Although the novel is exquisitely written, one would better appreciate hearing it with more vocal variety in the setting of scene and pace. J.P. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169914429 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2010 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
He wakes up one morning tracing letters in his head: the serpentine curl of the S in Sally, the rigid lines of the N in no, shimmering in capital, straight up, straight down, then up again. Capital S, capital N. Words appear before him as in a mirage and then become concrete, the letters sharp and defined. Sally does Not love me. Sight reaches sound and sound his tongue. He says the words aloud: Sally does Not love me.
It is a posture of indifference he affects. He does not want to lose her. He is afraid, and this fear feeds his delusion that can devalue her, make her unimportant to him. Sally does not love me, he repeats in his head, and then he adds, Justin does not care.
It is a dismal morning in March, the beginning of the month, the beginning of the first year of a new millennium, 2001, and she has come in that proverbial way, like a lion, blowing chilly winds the day before across the city that by night were leaden with snow. In the bleary light of this early dawn, Justin fixes his eyes on the oak tree outside his window, standing stoic, rigid against the wind that has long stripped it bare of leaves and threatens its branches. In the cups they form with the trunk, the snow is thick. Dense.
This tree is too big for this too-small city garden in Brooklyn, he thinks, both he and it in the wrong place: it there, he here. In the right climate for an oak tree, but not in this garden. In the right house for him, but not in this marriage.
Outside it is quiet, still like the dead. Inside, the scuttle of feet on the hardwood floor beneath him. She is up. Already in the dining room. Five steps, and in the kitchen. He closes his eyes and makes a bet with himself: He will hear the latch on the canister next, the place where she keeps her teas. Today, perhaps, Celestial Awakenings. He cannot be sure. Bounteous Sunlight, Early Sunrise, Heavenly Mornings: her panacea, her simple-minded answer to life's disturbing questions.
But the name of the tea is not part of his bet. His bet is that she will open the green canister, take out a bag of herbal tea, reach in the cupboard for a blue mug with little white flowers, fill the red kettle with water, turn on the fire, and sit with her face to the sun, planning her day while the water boils.
Primary colors: the green on the canister, the deep blues and whites on the mug, the red on the kettle, the yellow of her bathrobe. These are the colors that make Sally feel safe. A primary school teacher, she teaches these colors to the children in her class. Perhaps it is the color red she thinks of now, her lesson for the day. Perhaps the red kettle, whistling now, its shrill call piercing the silence, the signal he has been waiting for. His bet.
The herbal tea is to keep her calm, to chase away yesterday's worries: the bad news on TV last night, bills to be paid, the rash on Giselle's ankle. Giselle is their four-year-old daughter.
"Do you think she got it at the baby-sitter's?" she asked him last night.
"I don't think there's anything to be worried about."
"All the same." She rubbed calamine lotion on their daughter's tiny ankle. "You don't have to teach at the college tomorrow. Maybe she should stay home with you. If it gets any worse, you can take her to the doctor."
"It's a little rash, Sally. All children get a little rash."
"It's a rash. It does not matter if it is little or not."
"These things are normal for a child her age."
But little things like that worried Sally. Not the big things. Not that she did not love him when she married him. Not that she does not love him now. Not that he does not care.
"A rash is no reason to take her to the doctor," he said.
"Nothing bothers you, right?" Her face was tight with anger. "I wish I could be so casual."
He did not want a fight with her, not in front of their daughter. "Giselle can stay home with me," he said.
At night, in their bed, she asked, her voice soothing then: "Are you sure?"
The irritation he felt hours ago had not dissipated. "What is it you want, Sally? I said she can stay home with me tomorrow."
"Won't that be a problem for you? I mean, with your papers to grade?"
"Giselle is never a problem for me."
That was how they ended the night, his words thickening the air between them, she turning on the bed without saying good night, he closing his book, switching off the light on his night stand, and brooding: Sally does Not love me hovering in the dark recesses of his brain, not yet a shimmering mirage.
But he knows this morning she wants to be happy. When the little children file into her classroom, she wants the smile on her face to be bright. She wants no furrows on her forehead, no darkness around her eyes. It is to be a Heavenly Morning, a Celestial Awakening.
"Good morning, children."
She will sing out the words, her eyes trained to exude sunshine.
"Good morning, Mrs. Peters."
Mrs. Peters is happy. The children are happy. The children are happy because Mrs. Peters is happy.
This has become the essence of Sally's philosophy. Happiness is learned, she says. It is a skill like any other skill. Bad things come when they come. They cannot be stopped. I teach my children how to be happy. I show them how to forget the bad things.
She made this discovery, she told him, by accident, during a very bad time in her life. The man she loved had been murdered. She was driving home one day, tears almost blinding her, when graffiti on a wall caught her eyes. Someone had scrawled: It takes strength to be happy. "Those words changed my life," she said.
Which is why, lying on his bed this morning, Justin Peters knows that something is very wrong with his wife. It is not working, this skill she has taught herself. For some time now he has heard the heaviness in her voice, seen the darkness under her eyes. She is hiding something. He is certain of it.
A week ago she left the house before dawn. To prepare for her class trip, she said. She would be taking the kindergarten class to the Bronx Zoo. Ten boys, nine girls. Four parents would accompany them. She wanted to be in the school early, to get everything in order. Justin agreed to take Giselle to the babysitter's and to pick her up after his classes.
Not to worry, he said. He had everything under control. He would get pizza for dinner.
When she came to say good-bye that morning, it was obvious: neither Celestial Awakenings nor Heavenly Mornings had worked its magic. The circles under her eyes were dark, the lines around her mouth stiff.
Now, as he tries to reconstruct that morning, he cannot remember if he asked about the circles, but he remembers that she offered an explanation.
"I always get so worried before a trip. It's such a responsibility. The children are so young."
"But parents will be there."
"Four children for each adult," she said. "Though not quite."
"That seems more than enough."
"I'd be worried if Giselle were on a class trip," she said.
"Giselle is not in school."
"I mean when she goes to kindergarten. I can't imagine what I would do without Giselle. She is my life."
He believes now that at that moment she was thinking of the consequences of the discovery of her secret. She is my life. She said it as if there were a real possibility that something could happen and Giselle could be out of her life, that she could lose her. Then, that morning, he wanted to reassure her. He kissed her and held her to his chest. "Giselle will always be with you, Sally," he said.
Now he lies in his bed and recalls that she came home late that evening. When she slid next to him on the couch, she was trembling.
"It was terrible," she said. "One of the children got sick at lunch. She was vomiting and vomiting. Something she ate. I thought she would never stop."
He put his arm around her and she curled into him.
"I took her to the hospital."
"Didn't you call her parents?"
"Her mother came."
"She couldn't get off from work, huh?" Even when he said it, he knew he was covering for her. He had already made a mental calculation. If the child got sick at lunchtime and the mother came immediately, as any mother would, Sally would not have been needed and there would have been no reason for her to be home so late.
Why had he helped her? Was it fear? Was it because he was not yet ready to face the truth of his suspicions? For more than a month she had turned away from him in bed, and when she consented, their lovemaking was passionless. She went through the motions, but she wanted to be done. "Come," she said, she urged him on. She wanted it to end.
Then there were the phone calls. Five when the caller hung up. Three times in the last month when she abruptly ended her conversation on the phone as he entered the room. All the signs were there that something, someone, was pulling her away from him. And yet that day he supplied her with an excuse.
"They're so helpless when they get sick," she said. "The little girl was so weak, she couldn't stand up. I had to lift her. They need their mothers when they are so young."
He connects that statement and the one she made earlier that morning and finds himself thinking the impossible: If you do not love me, Sally, Giselle will not always be with you.
She comes in the bedroom and hands him his coffee. "Are you sure you'll be okay with Giselle?"
"Haven't I always been okay with Giselle?"
"You know what I mean. You have work to do."
"I will take her to the park," he says. "When we come back, she'll be sleepy and when she sleeps, I'll correct my papers."
"I'll get her ready," she says.
"You don't have to. Let her sleep late. I'll dress her."
She hesitates. "I may come home late this evening," she says, and walks into the bathroom.
She cannot be this cunning, he thinks. It is she who suggested that Giselle remain with him today. It is he who said Giselle's rash wasn't all that bad. But in the end, it is he, not she, who is insisting that Giselle stay at home.
She wants to be free, he thinks. She does not want to be encumbered. Not by a child, not by their daughter. Not by an obligation that would have her interrupt whatever she is doing, with whomever she is doing it, in the late afternoon.
Before she leaves, she kisses the sleeping Giselle. She does not kiss him.
"Is there something you want to tell me, Sally?" He has come downstairs. She has her hands on the doorknob, but he is unable to let her leave without asking the question.
She turns. "We'll talk," she says. "When I get home."
CHAPTER 2He has it all wrong.
"I know you're seeing someone," he says.
Justin begins this accusation at breakfast. It is late in the morning. He has already taken Giselle to the baby-sitter. When he returns, Sally is in the kitchen mixing batter for pancakes.
He does not teach today. Last night he persuaded Sally to call in sick. She did not need persuasion. She had come home with a headache. It was quarter to eight when she turned the key in the front door. He had checked the clock.
"I know you are having an affair," he says. And yet he does not mean that exactly. He does not believe there has been consummation. He believes that someone is seducing her and she is weakening. That and nothing more. Machismo will not allow him consummation.
He is a big man, a man one could call a macho man, which he isn't, not in the sense that he wears his manhood as a badge of honor. But the expectations of others can be demonic. Only surrender gives reprieve. Sometimes Justin surrenders, sometimes he confuses his size with his pride, and Justin's pride will not allow him to believe that his wife is sleeping with another man.
Dressed as he is today in black jeans and a close-fitting black turtleneck sweater — his usual attire, except for the black or gray jacket he wears in his classroom — it is obvious he is sinew not fat — broad shoulders, muscular arms, a washboard torso, and long sturdy legs. He has a typical Trinidadian face, he is told by fellow Trinidadians. He knows what they mean. In his veins, as in the veins of so many from the Caribbean, runs the blood of people continents and islands apart, histories smeared with ravage and conquest. On his mother's side, African, French, and Carib Indian; on his father's side, African, English, and Arawk Indian.
He is at ease with this ancestry, confounded by the irony of the ?ag- wavers of cultural diversity who would have him eliminate more than half his forefathers to lump himself in that political catchall called black. We are the true originators of multiculturalism, he tells them. It is a stance that does not gain him popularity at the small public college in Brooklyn where he teaches British literature and sometimes the Classics when he is permitted.
Yet it is this bouillabaisse of cultures that has made Justin handsome. His skin is brown, the color of sapodillas, his hair darker brown and wavy, his eyes grayish green, his lips neither too thin nor too thick. Still, there is in his mannerism something not quite Caribbean. His face lacks the openness of people on the islands. He is guarded — his expressions less expansive than they were when he left Trinidad, a young man barely nineteen, to accept a scholarship at Harvard. He will not hug his friends as he used to. He will not let his arm linger on their shoulders. And this not only because of his age. It is America that has taught him wary walking.
"Perhaps you have not done anything about it yet," he says to Sally, "but even if you have not done anything physical, it is still an affair if you love him." And that, too, he does not believe nor want to believe.
She sits, puts down the batter, props up her arms by her elbows, which are bent on the table, holds her head between her hands and begins to cry uncontrollably. One or two words slip out between her sobs, but he cannot make them out.
"Is it that serious?" he asks her.
"No. No." It seems to him that this is what she is saying.
He is unforgiving. "Whether it is serious or not, we cannot go on this way."
"It's not an affair," she says. She is saying something else but the words are indistinct.
"Call it what you like," he says, but he is hopeful. What he wants, what he needs, is reassurance. "Infidelity is infidelity," he says.
"It's not an affair." She is looking directly at him as she repeats this. The whites of her eyes are crisscrossed with tiny squiggly red lines, and below them the skin is almost navy blue, but these eyes are large and round, and though they are sad now, they ?t perfectly in a face made for them: the wide cheekbones, the nose that curves slightly at the end, the lips full and heart- shaped. She is wearing blue jeans and an off-white V neck sweater. The V exposes her skin. It is flawless. Like burnished copper. She is tall, with narrow hips and full breasts. Any man would forgive him for being jealous over her. But Justin is not jealous over her, so he tells himself. He is angry with her, a righteous anger for which he has cause. She is hiding something from him.
"I want things to change," she says.
"You want things to change?" He does not let up. His tone is almost a sneer.
"I can't keep doing this."
"I would imagine you can't. It must be dif?cult juggling two lives." The sneer is full-blown now, though at the edges of his lower lip a slight tremor betrays him.
"You don't understand. There is nobody else. There is no other man."
He folds his lip into his mouth and presses his upper teeth against it.
"No other man, Justin," she says.
No other man. It is all he wants to hear, but it will not do him good to have her see him cave in so quickly, to give her this advantage. "And if it is not an affair," he asks, "then what?"
"I am not happy, Justin."
"And when did you discover that?"
Last night, in spite of her headache, she gave Giselle her bath and sang nursery songs to her.
Hush little baby don't you cry,
Mama's gonna buy you a mocking bird,
and if that mocking bird don't sing,
Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring,
and if that diamond ring is brass,
Mama's gonna buy you a ...
It is a song for a baby and Giselle is four, but she loves it. "What else are you going to buy me, Mama?"
"Mama may not be able to buy you everything you want, but Mama will give you all the love in the world."
"How much?" the child asked.
He imagined her opening her arms as wide as she could when she answered, "As much as this and more, much more."
Giselle makes her happy, he thinks.
"You have not been happy, either," Sally is saying to him. She has stopped crying. Her hair had fallen across her face when she bent her head. Bits of it are still stuck to her wet cheeks. She pushes them away. The natural color of her hair is dark brown, but she has lightened it and wears it in a cascade of tight curls that reach just above her shoulders.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Grace"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Nunez.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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