The Shrine at Altamira

by John L'Heureux

Overview

Now available in a Grove paperback edition, The Shrine at Altamira by John L'Heureux has the simple shape and powerful impact of Greek tragedy. When Maria Corazon Alvarez meets Russell Whitaker at a school dance, she sees his blue eyes and solid American name as a ticket out of the ghetto into a better life. They dance, they touch, they tumble into a love so strong and elemental it should last forever. But gradually the balance shifts; he loves her more, she loves him less. When their son is born, Maria gives him all her love and Russell is pushed aside. Wild, obsessed, Russell runs mad and his desperate love becomes a fire that consumes them all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555846824
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John L'Heureux's characters are generally people in uncomfortable spots that tend to get infinitely less comfortable as the action goes on. In Having Everything, the title describes the middle-aged psychiatrist at its center. Technically, he does have everything: a prestigious Harvard teaching position, a beautiful wife, and two great kids. Trouble is, Philip Tate's beautiful wife is addicted to booze and pills, and Tate discovers new, self-destructive urges in himself that range from breaking and entering to infidelity with an equally screwed-up woman.

In An Honorable Profession, a popular high school English teacher whose personal life is a bit of a mess becomes even more troubled when a young student grows close to him and he finds himself destroyed by accusations of impropriety. L'Heureux revels in thorny issues, whether it's a marriage that's falling apart (quite devastatingly in The Shrine at Altamira) or a priest's decision whether or not to remain with the church (in 2002's The Miracle) -- a decision that L'Heureux himself faced when he ultimately decided to end his vocation as a Jesuit priest in 1971.

In his other, more farcical novels such as the academic satire The Handmaid of Desire and the comedy-thriller A Woman Run Mad, L'Heureux reveals his skill at creating a stable of nutty characters and bouncing them off one another. He is occasionally accused of being anachronistic: The New York Times said of The Handmaid of Desire, "Perhaps the time has passed when academic satire can be carried off successfully," and Salon accused Having Everything of being "so prim that it seems to belong to another time altogether." But if L'Heureux's themes aren't always new, his readers appreciate the funny and poignant twists he brings to them.

Hometown:

Stanford, California

Date of Birth:

October 26, 1934

Place of Birth:

South Hadley, Massachusetts

Education:

Graduate degrees in philosophy and English from Boston College and Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

Russell Whitaker, a college dropout who lives with his alcoholic father, and Maria Alvarez, a high-school senior who lives with her embarrassingly ethnic mother, meet at a dance and fall in love. When they decide to marry, both are motivated by the same secret agenda: escaping their parents' influence. After the birth of his son, Russell realizes that Maria loves the baby more than she loves him. Soon he is drinking the way his father did and plotting ways to get even. L'Heureux, author of A Woman Run Mad (Viking, 1988), has been criticized in the past for sensationalism and emotional excess. In The Shrine at Altamira , loosely based on a nationally publicized case of child abuse, he manages to turn a horror story of almost tabloid proportions into a tightly structured fable of free will and determinism. Recommended.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

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