The Republic of Love: A Novel

The Republic of Love: A Novel

Carol Shields

Language: English

Pages: 416

ISBN: 1480459860

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Stone Diaries gives us a love story for the ages: the tale of two polar opposites on a rocky road to romance
He’s a thrice-divorced late-night talk-show host. She’s an unmarried folklorist obsessed with mermaids. He lives for the present. She lives in the past. Both are leery of commitment. Neither has ever known lasting love. But when Tom Avery and Fay McLeod meet, it’s love—or at least lust—at first sight. And then fate starts to throw them curveballs.
Shifting between Tom and Fay’s stories—from their complicated histories through their present-day angst—The Republic of Love features delightful secondary characters in the lovers’ friends and families, including Fay’s seemingly happily married parents and her beloved godmother, Onion. As Tom and Fay forge bravely ahead into a romantic minefield, they make startling discoveries about each other and themselves. With her trademark wit and irony, and a deep compassion for her hero and heroine, Carol Shields gives us a celebration of love in all its guises.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

comes to rest on his back, where she discovers an appalling patch of dry skin. She tries to concentrate on the reverberations of Good Friday. The thoughts spill and roll. Does he know, she wonders, rocking him gently back and forth, that Good Friday has pagan roots? That it is the ultimate day of contradictions? Celebration mixed with gloom. Suffering with satiety. The dolorous and the delightful. Winter and spring. Cold and hot. Did he know, she silently pursues, that in certain quaint corners

withheld eloquence, were concentrated there in a terrace of brown knuckle-bone and grained skin. Onion is a nonbeliever, but she’s phoned the office of the Unitarian Church, which has sent over a tall fat young woman named Dot, and it is she who stands at the foot of Strom’s bed and reads the brief marriage ceremony. The window is wide open on this warm night, and the floor nurse, Gloria – her name in the form of a brooch is pinned to her uniform – has set up a fan in the doorway. Seated around

books, and whenever they see each other, which is at least once a week, sometimes oftener, they compare their progress. Fay will say: “The thing keeps getting beyond me. Either I stick to my original notion of collating mermaid legends and visual images and trying to isolate the common element, seduction or consolation or whatever, or I work the more primary grid, sorting out the primitive significance, goddess figures, the intersection with the Virgin cult, and all that stuff. It’s a blessing,

love with their babies. Fall in love, that’s how they phrase it, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. I know I did, and oh, I guess I just hate you to miss out on all that, even though I know, I really do, that you have a full life. In many ways. Doing what you want, just picking up and going when the spirit moves you, but there’s something to be said for having a center, for belonging to someone, your own family, not just one person living for himself or herself. Darn it all, sweetheart, I find it

surprising number of them call in requests. He knows what they’re after. They want their edges knocked off, they want to get some sleep so they can get up in the morning and get on with their dangerous daylight hours. They’re into the kind of music you pour straight from the bone marrow. Nostalgia’s all the hell they care about, all they’re up to. And a dose of Uncle Tom’s chitchat in between, keeping it intimate, throwing in the odd chunk of fortune-cookie mysticism. Hey, you out there. Just you

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