On a sunny day in San Francisco Bay, usually stable rheumatologist Abe Green loses it. After a tirade over his aspiring sculptor wife Cassandra's seemingly guilt-free infidelities, he leaps off the family sloop and swims back to shore. Their Harvard-bound daughter takes the helm from her frantic mother and sails them back to the city. The marriage is over, the family broken.
But that's just the prologue to Elizabeth Hill's The Violet Hour, a rich first novel about Cassandra's journey from her family's funeral home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington to the artsy hills of Berkeley. With an uncanny touch for the idiosyncrasies of families, Hill gradually unveils Cassandra's history--her parents' 54-year marriage, her needy younger siblings, her stalwart husband's marijuana addiction, her ambitious daughter's inappropriate men and her own passions and insecurities.
The heart of the novel is the family's return home for her father Howard's 80th birthday--an event fractured by his accidental death from a fall off the roof of his half-built sauna. Without his paternal anchorage, they quickly unravel. Hill is especially good with Cassandra's always difficult mother, Eunice, who "was simply fond of saying no... a ringing and resounding no to almost everything," and who stayed home "ironing righteously" while Howard took his children to the playground.
The Violet Hour doesn't tell a new story. There are no new stories except in the telling; and in that, Hill has made a notable debut. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.