Stern Men
by Elizabeth Gilbert
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth GilbertEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-06-08
ISBN: 061812733X
Number of pages: 289
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of Stern Men
Book Review: Ms. Gilbert made me feel as if I lived on plodding, boring Fort Niles with her slow-paced storyline.
Summary: 2 Stars
I loved "Eat, Pray, Love" which I read last summer... and I don't really like non-fiction. I happened upon "Stern Men," an early fiction work of Ms. Gilbert--- and I hoped to really identify with the character as she came of age in the 70's and early 80's as I did. I struggled with Ruth being characterized as a "feminist". She was certainly not an activist because she spent most of her time observing others in her torpor, talking about what she might do, but never doing it. I FELT her post-graduation summer doldrums because the story was so tedious until the Wishnell wedding, well through half the book. Maybe it was the author's intent for me to feel Ruth's pain as her summer droned on?
Overall, the characters were quirky and well-developed-- perhaps overly developed for this story-- because they were not tied together well in the rushed Epilogue. (The warm Mrs. Pommeroy was my favorite character, not Ruth, the heroine.) Upon finishing this book I felt unsettled... I may have enjoyed a more condensed version of the storyline with fewer descriptions of blustering, mean-spirited lobstermen and alcoholic wives. And whose skull did Webster find in the mud flats?
Summary of Stern Men
On two remote islands off the coast of Maine, the local lobstermen have fought savagely for generations over the fishing rights to the ocean waters between them. Young Ruth Thomas is born into this feud, the daughter of one of the greediest lobstermen in Maine. Eighteen years old, as smart as a whip, and irredeemably unromantic, Ruth returns home from boarding school determined to throw her education overboard and join the "stern men." As the feud escalates, she helps work the lobster boats, brushes up on her profanity, and eventually falls for Owney Wishnell, a handsome young lobsterman. "Funny, clever and wise" (Seattle Times), STERN MEN captures a feisty American spirit through this unforgettable heroine who is destined for greatness despite herself.
John Irving wishes. That he could be as mordantly funny as Elizabeth Gilbert, that is. With the publication of her first novel, Stern Men, Gilbert has been widely compared to New England's unofficial novelist laureate. And the comparison is a natural; this writer gives us a tough, lovable heroine against an iconoclastic, rural backdrop. Ruth Thomas grows up on Fort Niles Island, off the coast of Maine, among lobstermen, lobster boats, and, well, lobsters. There's just not much out there besides ocean. Abandoned by her mother, she lives sometimes with her dad and sometimes with her beautiful neighbor, Mrs. Pommeroy, and the seven idiot Pommeroy boys. Eventually she is plucked from obscurity by the wealthy Ellises--vacationers on Fort Niles for some hundred years--and sent, against her will, to a fancy boarding school in Delaware. (Sorting out her relationship with this highly manipulative family is one of the novel's crooked joys.) Now she has returned, and is casting about for something to do.
What Ruth does (hang around with her eccentric island friends, fall in love, organize the lobstermen) makes for an engaging book that's all the more charming for its rather lumpy, slow-paced plotting. Gilbert delivers a kind of delicious ethnography of lobster-fishing culture, if such a thing is possible, as well as a love story and a bildungsroman. But best of all, she possesses an ear for the ridiculous ways people communicate. One of Mrs. Pommeroy's young sons, "in addition to having the local habit of not pronouncing r at the end of a word--could not say any word that started with r.... What's more, for a long time everyone on Fort Niles Island imitated him. Over the whole spread of the island, you could hear the great strong fishermen complaining that they had to mend their wopes or fix their wigging or buy a new short-wave wadio."
The beauty of Gilbert's book is that she gives us an isolated rural culture, and refuses to settle for finding humor in its backwardness. Instead she gives us a community of uneducated but razor-sharp wits, and produces an impressive comic debut. --Claire Dederer
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