Contents: IntroductionPlot Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources Further Reading |
Characters
Abelove
Abelove is the charismatic leader of the Green Isle Co-op. His background is a mystery: no one even knows his true first name, which is described as "something odd and awkward like 'Charlesworth.'" He is a peaceful man who talks about helping the poor, extolling Christian principles while at the same time worrying about expanding the financial range of the co-op. All of the women at the co-op, including Marianne, are secretly in love with Abelove.
Patrick is suspicious of Abelove. Corinne banters with him throughout a meal, but she turns abruptly against Abelove when he comments on Marianne's personality.
After Marianne has risen in rank to become his valuable assistant, and rumors have spread through the co-op that she might be involved with Hewie Miner, Abelove confesses to Marianne that he is in love with her and wants to marry her. Though it is her desire, she sneaks away that night, unable to cope with such potential happiness.
Birk
Birk, once one of Abelove's students at Kilburn College, serves as assistant director at the Green Isle Co-Op when Marianne is there. He disappears without a trace one day, leaving behind all of his belongings.
Button
Della Rae Duncan
A mentally challenged girl from the poor area of Mt. Ephraim, Della Rae is molested by a group of boys from the football team.
Miss Penelope Hagström
On the road by herself, Marianne is taken into the home of Miss Hagström, an elderly, crippled poet. Famous nationally for her writing, Miss Hagström is known in her own town of Spartansburg as an unfortunate woman who was abandoned by her fiancée years ago and has been weakened over the decades by multiple sclerosis. She is a sharp wit and is usually kind to Marianne, seeing in her the intelligence and capability which Marianne does not see in herself. At times, though, Miss Hagström can be bitter and sarcastic.
When Miss Hagström offers to elevate Marianne's position, to make her the associate director of the Hagström Foundation for the Arts in addition to being her personal assistant, Marianne finds the increased involvement uncomfortable and leaves her one night without saying goodbye to Miss Hagström.
Miss Ethel Hausmann
When it is decided that Marianne cannot stay at High Point Farm with her family, she is sent to live in Salamanca with Ethel Hausmann, a relative on Corinne's side. Miss Hausmann is not familiar to the family. She is in her early fifties and has never had children of her own; she has worked for a podiatrist for thirty years, silently in love with him.
Haw Hawley
When they were first married, Corinne and Michael Mulvaney spent their time with a rowdy crowd at the Wolf's Head Inn, owned by "Haw" Hawley. Corinne looks down on him as a drunk, but he is polite and helpful the night that he calls her to the inn to help Michael, who has been injured in a fight.
Zachary Lundt
Zachary Lundt is the boy who rapes Marianne Mulvaney. He is a senior, the same age as Patrick and a year older than Marianne, when she catches his eye at the Valentine's dance, and he offers to drive her home when her date has to leave early. In his car, he gives Marianne liquor and tells her he has a confused life and he feels comfortable talking with her about serious philosophical matters. He tells her that she brings out the best in him. After a while, though, he becomes angry and rapes her.
Because Zach is a popular member of the football team, what he has done does not reflect badly on him. The other students at Mt. Ephraim High support him, turning against the Mulvaneys, spreading rumors that Marianne was his willing sexual partner.
Years later, when Zach is away at the state university at Binghamton studying business administration, he comes home for spring break and is abducted outside a bar by Patrick Mulvaney. Taken at gunpoint to a nearby bog, Zach denies knowing what Patrick is talking about regarding the girl he raped, and he begs shamelessly to have his life spared.
Sable Mills
Sable shares a house with Corinne in 1993, the time at which the book ends. It is an arrangement that provides both women with financial security and companionship. The two met after running into each other repeatedly at antique auctions and with their shared interest have opened an antique store, Alder Antiques, on the farm they share.
Sable is ten years younger than Corinne and attended the same high school. She has been married and divorced three times and has children and grandchildren. While Corinne is a natural home-maker, Sable is a natural businessperson, making their partnership well-rounded and fulfilling.
Hewie Miner
Hewie Miner is the worker at the Green Isle Co-op who agrees to drive Marianne across the state to her grandmother's funeral. He is shy but kind and on suspension from college for having loaned his lab notes to another student. Hewie hardly talks over the course of the thirteen-hour trip. When they return to the co-op, Hewie tells her that he would be glad to do anything for her because he is in love with her. Rumors circulate that Marianne and Hewie are romantically linked, spurring Abelove to confess his own love for Marianne.
Mule
Corinne Mulvaney
Corinne is the mother of the Mulvaney family and its spiritual center. She is highly spirited with a zest for life. At first, her enthusiasm infects her children, driving them to be successful in school. After Marianne has been raped, though, Corinne alienates her children by making the decision to stand by her husband, so that when he finds it too painful to live with Marianne, she agrees to send her daughter away to live with a distant relative. She tries to remain positive during the turmoil that tears her family apart, but her cheerfulness is just seen as self-delusion.
Corinne is a devout churchgoer. A formative episode from her childhood occurred when she and her mother were in a car accident in a blizzard when she was seven: they walked through the snow and became lost, and probably would have frozen if their way were not lit by a swarm of fireflies. Improbable as everyone else finds the story, Corinne looks back on the incident as a sign from God.
After Marianne is raped on Valentine's Day in 1976, Corinne finds herself able to talk to a therapist and a few friends about what happened, though she is not able to use the word, "rape." She tries to be supportive but is defensive about her husband and agrees to send Marianne away for his sake. Corinne talks with Marianne infrequently. As Michael sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholism, she takes control of family matters, including the most painful to her, the sale of High Point Farm. Still, she loses her husband.
In the end, Corinne is happy, living with her friend Sable Mills on a farm not far from the one where she raised her family and running an antique store like the one she ran at High Point Farm. She hosts the family reunion at the end of her book and is surrounded by children, grandchildren, friends, and church members.
Judd Mulvaney
Judd, the narrator of the book, is the youngest Mulvaney, born several years after his next older sibling, which leaves him with a feeling that the peak years of the Mulvaney family life, the ones that were most legendary, came before he arrived and that subjects are being discussed that he is does not know about. In 1976, when Judd is thirteen, his siblings leave home in quick order: Marianne is sent to live with relatives, Mike goes into the Marines, and Patrick goes to college.
When Patrick decides to kill the boy who raped Marianne, he phones Judd from college and enlists him in the plan, instructing Judd to secretly remove one of the rifles from the house. Judd is frightened, but he also admires his brother and vows not to let him down. He delivers the gun to Patrick and later picks it up without ever finding out what happened with it.
Judd is left with his parents and watches his father's downward spiral as he loses his business and the house. Then one night in 1980 he and his father come to open physical confrontation, and Judd, still in high school, moves out and takes his own rented room in a ramshackle building.
At the end of the book, Judd is thirty, the editor of a twice-a-week local newspaper.
Marianne Mulvaney
The story of the destruction of the Mulvaney family centers on the rape of seventeen-year-old Marianne. She is a happy, popular teenager, a member of the 4-H club and the cheerleading squad, until Zachary Lundt gets her drunk after the Valentine's dance and rapes her. After that, Marianne finds herself ostracized: first at school, where she is treated as though she is promiscuous, and at home, where her father is unable to come to grips with his own failure to protect her.
Marianne internalizes the blame for the rape, feeling that she is just as responsible as Zach Lundt was for what happened because she was drinking in his car. Having been sent away, she waits patiently for years, expecting to be called back home. In later life, she finds herself unable to deal with emotional attachments or responsibilities: when Abelove, whom she has had a crush on, declares his love and asks her to marry him, she runs away from the co-op without telling him, and when Penelope Hagström offers to promote her to an executive position in her charitable organization, Marianne again runs off without a word. She eagerly races to her father's death bed when she hears he has called for her, only to find that he is too far gone to recognize her.
Marianne ends up happily married to Whit West, a veterinarian who runs a shelter for animals. Her childhood on the farm, and her love for her horse Molly-O and her cat, Muffin, who is her traveling companion throughout the book, are reflected in her eventual sense of security at Dr. West's clinic.
Michael Mulvaney Sr.
Michael Mulvaney is the father of the Mulvaney family, their protector and the source of their dissolution, dying estranged from his wife and children, addled by alcohol, and bitter.
Michael Mulvaney came from a large Irish Catholic family, leaving home at age eighteen to get away from his drunk, abusive father: because he left, his father insisted that no one in the family would ever contact him for the rest of his life. After marrying Corinne, his family grew, and his business, Mulvaney Roofing, prospered, growing into one of the largest in the county. As he succeeded, Michael left behind his working-class friends and began associating with others who were prosperous.
After attacking the boy who raped Marianne and finding out that the law will not prosecute him, Michael begins drinking heavily. His business suffers, and he loses money on lawyer fees. He becomes increasingly bitter toward the people he thought were his friends and even toward his family. He cannot bear to see Marianne anymore, so she is sent away, which angers his sons.
Michael loses his business; he loses the farm; he argues with Corinne and leaves her. Late in his life, after he has taken jobs from men he would not have even hired at Mulvaney Roofing, he spends an evening with his son, Mike, who finds that his father barely has a grasp on reality anymore. Eventually, Michael is found lying in the street, and his family is called to his deathbed. He is thought to have called for Marianne, to whom he has not talked in the years since she was banished, but it could also be that he actually spoke the name of his favorite sister, Marian.
Michael Mulvaney Jr. is the most obscure family member, in part, because he is the most distant from the book's narrator, Judd, and in part because he moves away early. When Marianne is molested, Mike is already out of high school and working for his father's roofing company. He is a former high school football hero, and his younger brother and sister are reminded of his social position by the trophies in school that bear his name. Although he has a sense of honor, like all the Mulvaneys, he also bears the shame of not interfering with his friends when he knew they were raping a girl.
After Marianne is raped, Mike, like his father, soothes his anger with drinking. He becomes known to local police because of his reckless driving, but his football hero reputation saves him from serious charges. After he injures a girl badly in a car accident, he joins the Marines. For most of the novel, he is away. He ends up with a wife and two children, working as a civil engineer in Wilmington, Delaware.
Patrick Mulvaney
Patrick is a boy genius, with a keen scientific mind but none of the social skills that the other members of his family enjoy. He attends high school with Marianne, one grade above her: after she is raped, Patrick has to live with the school gossip that she has been promiscuous and got what she deserved. He becomes so bitter that he sabotages his graduation, at which he is speaking as valedictorian, with a stink bomb in the air ducts.
In college, Patrick finds himself even more an outcast. He goes to a concert, attempting to behave in the way that normal college students behave, and he sees someone who resembles Zachary Lundt: this association leads to the revelation that Lundt's assault on his sister has caused all of the troubles that have torn apart the Mulvaney family and the idea that he can correct the family's problems by killing Lundt. He kidnaps at gunpoint the man he considers his enemy and takes him to a deserted bog, but at the last minute he realizes that killing him will not make life better for the Mulvaneys.
After realizing the futility of revenge, Patrick quits school and travels. He is not in contact with the family often and cannot be reached when his father dies. It is a surprise when he shows up at the family reunion at the end of the book well-adjusted: he is physically fit, has a beautiful girlfriend, and has a peaceful outlook on life.
Pinch
Ranger
Dr. Whittaker West
West is a veterinarian who has a clinic for stray animals, Stump Creek Hill, that has gained national attention. He divides his time between treating animals and lobbying politicians for grants to support his work. On her own, living in a rented room with her cat Muffin, Marianne goes to West's clinic one day when the cat is sick. She becomes involved with the animal refuge and moves in, taking on more and more duties. When Muffin dies, West tells her that he is in love with her. They show up at the family reunion, years later, married, with children.
