Pages for You: A Novel

by Sylvia Brownrigg

Overview

A wry, tender novel of sexual and intellectual awakening. Something made her risk a look at the reader, who took a sip of black coffee. And another. She turned the pages. She pursed her lips. Flannery abandoned her breakfast and watched the woman drink her coffee. It wasn't that she wanted the coffee herself. That wasn't it. Rather, she wanted to be the coffee: she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips.In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. Flannery, a seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her -- college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life -- is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty wherever it takes her. By chance she finds herself enrolled in a class taught by the remote, brilliant older woman; intimidated at first, she gradually becomes Anne Arden's student outside class as well. Whatever the subject -- Baudelaire, lipstick colors -- Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.A bittersweet, exhilarating, sentimental education, Pages for You confirms Sylvia Brownrigg as "one of the most exuberantly agile minds among younger American writers" (Dan Cryer, Newsday) and is her sexiest, most poignant work to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429930604
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/06/2002
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	240,123
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of the novel The Metaphysical Touch (FSG, 1999) and a collection of short stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World (FSG, 2000). She lives in San Francisco.

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of a collection of stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World and the novels Pages for You and The Metaphysical Touch. She has a degree in philosophy from Yale University and lives in Berkeley, California.

Read an Excerpt

Pages For You
PART ONE 
 
The leaves were confettied brightly over the sidewalk as if a parade had just passed, and Flannery did not think she had ever in her life seen such colors. They would get deeper and more heartfelt, she knew, with warm oranges and pomegranate reds, and she could hardly wait for the experience. Like every other sensation, that sight was still before her. But already they were goldenrod and butternut on the ground, and up in the trees (she looked skyward) infinite greens, all the apple and lime and melon flesh she could imagine. They were so beautiful she wanted to eat them or breathe them, take them inside her, make them part of herself. At the very least, she wanted to not ever forget them. She told her memory to hold on to them; there might come a time later when she would need their solace.She came from a place where autumn meant oncoming dampness and fog, the new drawl of the school year: a plain, dull gravity of shoulders and hope. Nothing like this fierceness of light and the brisk bite of cold on the cheek, which seemed playful, a love nip, rather than a somber slap of warning that winter might come. She was not yet wary of the winters here, having not moved through one. She knew this approaching splendor meant death and decay, the boding of ice-prisoned branches and slippery black streets, butcould not make herself feel the grief in it. All this vividness she could read only as exhilaration. Not melancholy.Flannery abandoned herself to movie clichés of the East she'd learned as a girl in the West. She kicked her tennis-shoed feet through the leaves. She buried her hands in the pockets of her coat, which had a serious weight she was not used to. She knew that this lift of fall glory, which brought her to a shocking peak of happiness--from where, suddenly, she had a complete panoramic view; could see the shape of her future, the blank scope of her forthcoming cities and days--she knew that she would never again reach such a height of pure, sensual pleasure. Never again in her life.She was seventeen. She had no idea about anything, really. And she was about to meet someone--literally, around the next corner.Within that person, a new and altogether unsuspected happiness waited.Copyright © 2001 by Sylvia Brownrigg

Editorial Reviews

The narrator of Brownrigg's thoroughly engaging new novel asks this question of her departed lover: "What would happen if I wrote some pages for you? Each day a page... to show you that I am finding a story, the story of how we might have been together, once." What follows is roughly 100 short chapters chronicling the rise and fall of one woman's first love. Flannery Jansen, 17 and fresh from a "one-horse town" in California, falls headlong for a teaching assistant at the tony (and never named) East Coast university she attends. Page by page, Brownrigg captures in delicious and witty prose the rapture and humiliation of first love: first sight, first words, first flirtation, first gift, first kiss, first night, first declaration, first fight and, as the prologue gives away, first betrayal. A lesser writer would be swamped in sentimentality, but Brownrigg handles her material with great good humor and vitality. Readers familiar with Brownrigg's first two books, the novel The Metaphysical Touch and the story collection Ten Women Who Shook the World, know that her characterizations are deft and spare. Here, in pitch-perfect dialogue, she conveys the dueling attitudes of an aspiring writer from the West and a teaching assistant deeply schooled in traditional literary criticism and academic mores. That Flannery's lover, Anne Arden, is a woman is not quite beside the point. The lovers are well aware others might find them "freaks." But refreshingly, Brownrigg doesn't make Flannery and Anne victims. They are simply two girls in love which shouldn't put any readers off. This exquisitely written, bittersweet Valentine of a novel is for any reader who has ever been in a romantic relationship and wants to remember and revel in all the foolish things we do for love. (Apr.) Forecast: Brownrigg's audience of discerning readers will grow with this book, which booksellers may recommend for its wit, fast-moving pace and emotional candor; the sexy jacket speaks for itself. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Brownrigg prunes back the overextended abstractions that weighed down The Metaphysical Touch (1999) to produce an affectingly slender love story. Coltish Flannery Jansen arrives from the west for her freshman year at carefully unnamed Yale University knowing nothing: not what autumn looks like, or what to order for breakfast, or how to wear her hair. And the coolly appraising eye of Anne Arden, the teaching assistant for the section of Introduction to Criticism she signs up for, makes her even more awkward and self-conscious. Since Brownrigg scorns the romantic-comedy artifices that might have kept the two women apart, however-the only obstacle here is Flannery's emotional turmoil-by Thanksgiving break they've consummated their affair over a New York weekend. The narrative voice, which, apart for a couple of imprudent glances inside Anne, remains locked into Flannery's perspective, is so ardent that the love affair seems not so much described as overheard, an effect that's accentuated by a prologue offering these lyrical, warmly episodic pages to a hopelessly distant ex-lover. Brownrigg (Ten Women Who Shook the World, 2000) floats her romantic couple along in such a hothouse atmosphere-apart from a math major with a crush on Flannery and a Korean student with a crush on Anne, there's scarcely another character on display, and the lovers' chance encounter with a pair of anonymous Florida honeymooners leads to disaster-that their world of poetry and smoking and clinging kisses seems complete in itself. Of course, no world that's been so easily won is going to remain complete for very long, and the affair ends in a flurry of missteps that seem just as facile as itsvaultingascent to the heights of bliss. A valentine that perfectly captures love's power to isolate the lovers from the rest of the world-and, in the end, from each other.

Kirkus Reviews