One of TIME magazine’s best summer reads, a “wise” (Entertainment Weekly) and “resplendent” (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut that follows a new widower confronting the truth about his long marriage. After the sudden death of his wife, Maida, Gene is haunted by the fear that their marriage was not all it appeared to be. Alongside Ed and Gayle Donnelly, friends since college days, he tries to … friends since college days, he tries to resurrect happy memories of the times the two couples shared, raising their children in a small New Hampshire town and vacationing together at a lake house every summer.
Meanwhile, his daughter, Dary, challenges not only his happy version of the past but also his view of Maida. As a long-standing rift between them deepens, Gene starts to understand how unknown his daughter is to him — and how enigmatic his wife was as well. And a lingering suspicion seizes his mind that could upend everything he thought he knew.
Katharine Dion’s assured debut moves seamlessly between Gene’s present-day journey and the long history of a marriage and friendship. Rich and wonderfully alive, The Dependents is the most moving kind of drama, an intimate glance into the expanse of family life and the way we must all eventually bridge the chasm between what we want to believe and what we know to be true.
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When this book arrived in the mail, its author, Katharine Dion, was a person unknown to me. Not anymore. The Dependents is a fine debut, full of intelligent writing and free of the canine desire to please that afflicts so much contemporary writing. And yet this book pleases on many levels. I will look for Ms. Dion’s work in the future.
Something was keeping me from writing a review of The Dependents by Katharine Dion. I loved the book. I found it thoughtful and moving and surprising, and somber and soulful. Why was I wordless?
It came to me that I identified too much with Gene, the protagonist, a recent widower who can’t move beyond the loss of his wife of 49 years.
I have been married for 46 years. I was a month from my 20th birthday when I married. And for all our ups and downs, good times and bad times, my husband has been my best friend. I could feel Gene’s loss and knew it might someday be mine, or my husband’s.
“In some mad inversion of time, grieving his wife’s death resembled falling in love.”-The Dependents
After Maida’s sudden death, Gene learns that his wife was in many ways a stranger to him. Who truly knows and understands another? We are like locked chests, filled with treasures and terrors we can not share. Gene depended on Maida, saw only her best, assumed she was happy. But now he wonders, did she love him? Was Gene her ‘one and only’ or merely a comfortable compromise?
In college, the shy Gene latched onto the more worldly Ed. Ed pairs with Gayle, who Gene also liked, and introduced Gene to Maida. It took Gene a long time to make a move to make Maida his girlfriend; he fell in love with her first. He was elated when she agreed to marry him. He was lucky, he thought. The two couple’s friendship has remained central to all their lives; they vacation together at the lake every year, raising their kids together.
Maida’s dad set Gene up in his own shoe store business. Gene thought there was something honorable in fine footwear. But shopper’s values changed, and the store closed. Maida had her work at the college child care center. Gene went to his old office out of habit.
Maida and Gene had a daughter, Dary, who has a daughter Annie. Dary is no comfort to her grieving father; she insists on an understanding of her mother that evades Gene’s ideal. Dary insists Maida had other lovers before him and needs outside of her work as a childcare provider, wife, and mother. That she had given up some better version of herself to be Gene’s wife.
As Gene begins to see who his wife truly was, he doubts everything he took for granted, struggling to understand how love was not enough, how he had failed the women he loved.
Gene must come to terms with the meaning of his life when so much had eluded him. When our life is nearing completion, should we second-guess our choices, regret the life we lived? Or realize it’s what we wanted, after all.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
After the sudden death of his wife of fifty years, Gene feels compelled to reevaluate his entire life. Did his wife really love him? Did she keep secrets from him? Did the couple who became their lifelong best friends back in college take advantage of him? Does his daughter understand him? These and other questions take up so much of his time that he allows both the necessities of day-to-day living and even his health to flag. But when his probe into the past is interrupted by the woman his daughter hires to clean for him, Gene finds himself ready to engage with life once again, perhaps more robustly than ever … for a time.
This novel is filled with so much wisdom about aging and grief that it was a shock for me to learn the author is so young. The Dependents moves along at a slow pace—the perfect pace, in fact, for the unfolding of this beautiful, engaging, and well-told story