Keynote
Paperback edition of what Booklist calls "a resounding performance"
Book Title
When All Is Said and Done
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- “With evocative, freewheeling prose (‘the run-on sentences that were her married life’), Hill. . . nimbly salvages one family's striving from an era of grasping and consumerism.”—Publishers Weekly
Body
Eight years and four jobs and five pregnancies and meetings and train schedules and formula and diapers and deadlines and clients and mortgage and croup and a revolving door of baby nurses and Dan stagnating in that civilian job I convinced him to take when the Air Force wanted him back for Korea of all things, they got Elvis, they didn't need Dan, a man of his age, for crying out loud, and after what they did to him in that hospital upstate . . .
It is the early 1960s and Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sell ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.
"From the first glorious sentence to its last astounding word, Robert Hill's When All is Said and Done is a treasure. The sophisticated wit and luxurious language of this brilliant novel weave a story of one family's complex heart and history and their journey through 1950s/60s suburban Connecticut and all its prejudices. Read this American saga and weep."—Tom Spanbauer
It is the early 1960s and Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sell ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.
"From the first glorious sentence to its last astounding word, Robert Hill's When All is Said and Done is a treasure. The sophisticated wit and luxurious language of this brilliant novel weave a story of one family's complex heart and history and their journey through 1950s/60s suburban Connecticut and all its prejudices. Read this American saga and weep."—Tom Spanbauer
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$14.00
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About the Author
Credit: Mark Schlesinger
Praise
- “Mr. Hill’s daring style is full of candied rewards. . . . Reading [Mr. Hill’s] novel reminds us how usual most novels are; his is unusual. . . The work of an individual who has been minding his own business in Portland.”—The New York Sun
- “[Hill] is audacious in experimenting with the sound and pace and rhythm of language to convey personality, mood, and social status. . . . A witty, generous heartbreaking book.”—The Olympian
- “Truly the most enjoyable, evocative prose I’ve come across in new fiction in quite a while.”—City Pages
- “There’s nothing like an exhilarating first novel to rejuvenate a literature lover's faith in fiction's power to throw open the doors of perception....Hill writes with velocity, rhythm, and wit, conveying a world of subtle emotions and social nuance in brilliantly syncopated inner monologues and staccato dialogue, creating a bravura and resounding performance….Hill has written a breakneck, wisecracking, tenderhearted, socially revealing portrait of an unusual early 1960s American marriage.”—Booklist
