From “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America…immensely talented and brave” (Michael Schaub, NPR), a historical saga about love, class, and the past we never escape. The Peacock Feast opens on a June day in 1916 when Louis C. Tiffany, the eccentric glass genius, dynamites the breakwater at Laurelton Hall–his fantastical Oyster Bay mansion, with columns capped by … Oyster Bay mansion, with columns capped by brilliant ceramic blossoms and a smokestack hidden in a blue-banded minaret–so as to foil the town from reclaiming the beach for public use. The explosion shakes both the apple crate where Prudence, the daughter of Tiffany’s prized gardener, is sleeping and the rocks where Randall, her seven-year-old brother, is playing.
Nearly a century later, Prudence receives an unexpected visit at her New York apartment from Grace, a hospice nurse and the granddaughter of Randall, who Prudence never saw again after he left at age fourteen for California. The mementos Grace carries from her grandfather’s house stir Prudence’s long-repressed memories and bring her to a new understanding of the choices she made in work and love, and what she faces now in her final days.
Spanning the twentieth century and three continents, The Peacock Feast ricochets from Manhattan to San Francisco, from the decadent mansions of the Tiffany family to the death row of a Texas prison, and from the London consultation room of Anna Freud to a Mendocino commune. With psychological acuity and aching eloquence, Lisa Gornick has written a sweeping family drama, an exploration of the meaning of art and the art of dying, and an illuminating portrait of how our decisions reverberate across time and space.
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An explosive moment that shatters generations, a buried trauma, the unspoken weight of history: In this original and beautifully rendered novel, two women, strangers to each other, hold pieces of a puzzle they can only construct together. Weaving fact and fiction to paint the evolution of a family over the sweep of a century, Lisa Gornick plumbs the connections that transform lives in a book that is both gripping and elegantly nuanced.
The Peacock Feast is one of those rare books that feels both grand and intimate, bringing the reader deeply into a very vivid past. Lisa Gornick has written an engrossing and impressive book.
The Peacock Feast is a dazzling panorama of a novel ― moving from a Tiffany mansion to a gardener’s tenement apartment to a sixties’ commune to a death row unit to an old woman’s beautifully decorated last room. The forces of social history and the forces of personal trauma weave the remarkable plot, and readers will be left applauding.
Lisa Gornick’s The Peacock Feast is a multi-generational historical fiction novel with a deep and universal theme that can speak across the generations. Gornick’s characters take the burden of the past into their futures, cutting them off from a full life. Suppressed memories are as constricting as those which consume us; neither allow us to risk a full life.
The Peacock Feast was Louis Tiffany’s “performance art” dinner for a select group of top-tier society men, every minutia controlled by him. Prudence is in her nineties and the event is her earliest memory, watching the parade of girls carrying the cooked fowl redressed in their gaudy feathers. She recalls her hand over the mouth of a small boy.
Prudence’s parents were employed by the Tiffany family at Laurelton Hall, the Oyster Bay home Tiffany designed. Her father was his gardener and her mother worked as a housekeeper. After Tiffany blew up the breakwater that created what he believed was his private beach, and which the town insisted was for all, Prudence’s family left. Her older brother Randall couldn’t stand their father’s drinking and ran away from home, never to see Prudence again.
Prudence made a career, married a man because she’d be crazy to say no to, and later in life fell in love but was afraid to say yes. Now, in her last months, Randall’s granddaughter Grace has sought Prudence out and together they piece the mystery of their family’s history and the traumatic incident that divided them.
The story skips back and forth in time between generations; a family tree on your bookmark may be helpful to keep track of them. Reoccuring choices appear in the family, generations unwittingly mirroring each other.
Gornick has given us a beautifully written book, complex with characters’ stories across four generations. For all the sorrow and heartbreak in her character’s lives, we are left with understanding and hope.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
This is a beautiful story and so wonderfully written. I highly recommend it.
I was disappointed at the pace of this book. I could have edited it down by half. I was interested in the events around Tiffany but there was very little of that. I confess to doing a lot of skimming of superfluous material.
Readers are drawn into the story because of the tidbits of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s presence, but Comfort and the story of this family are on the periphery. The heroine’s story is not strong enough to carry the story. It felt like twists in the plot are used to keep the reader from closing the book. Not terrible, but I can’t recommend the book.
For me this book had too many characters and too many time periods. The author jumped from one subject and decade to the other with every chapter which made the story hard to follow and hard to really get into. I wanted to love the main character but I felt like you didn’t really get a chance to. Also, the whole Peacock Feast title and story surrounding it really had little to do with the characters, it was just loosely intertwined and a topic to come back to. Just not a book for me. No surprises no plot twists.
A fabulous and thought-provoking reading experience with fascinating characters! A complex cast with a storyline that intricately intersects. Hauntingly realistic poignant moments. This is a richly woven atmospheric family saga that far exceeded my expectations.
Interesting historical fiction. Not a cheery read but well written.
Don’t waste your time and money w/this book!
Interesting and lively, but fails to pack an emotional wallop.
The slow reveal of the family members of generations forward, affected by the dynamiting of the breaker that fronted Tiffany’s mansion property to prevent the public from accessing what had been a public beach is done so deftly I applaud the author.