On The Bookshelf
AT CENTERPOINT
ItiVites you to a
Y AR/ EVE
Female Bonding
with
world-renowned
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Anita Diamant's new boo k explores the relationship
of two modern-day Jewish women.
KIRK
WHALUM
SANDEE BRAWARS KY
eceinger 31, 2001
gi/ //le
Special to the Jewish News
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Mile)
or Anita Diamant, conversa-
tion is "the meat and pota-
toes of women's friendship."
Her new novel, Good Harbor
(Scribner: $25), features a lot of talking:
Many soulful conversations take place
between two women who are new
friends as they take walks along the
beach. The contemporary backdrop is
Good Harbor — which is a real place
— in Gloucester, Mass., on Cape Ann.
Good Harbor is altogether different in
setting from Diamant's 1997 first novel,
The Red Tent, which was a publishing
phenomenon. That book, an embellish-
ment of the life of Dinah set in ancient
times, sold more than 1.5 million copies
and was published in 18 ,
countries. Julia Roberts
told Oprah magazine
that Tent was one of her
favorite books ever.
With the kind of liter-
ary buzz that authors
dream of, it was a word-
of-mouth success, read
and discussed by reading
groups around the world.
Like The Red Tent, the
new book is also about
For the two
women and their rela-
women in
tionships. Both books,
Anita
says Diamant, describe
Diamant's
"the undescribed parts of
new novel,
people's lives."
talk -is any-
And while best-sellers
thing but
like Helen Fielding's
cheap.
Bridget Jones's Diary and
Lucinda Rosenfeld's
What She Saw have
spurred other amusing
books about distressed single young
women, Harbor proves married, middle-
aged heroines can sell books, too.
"My work honors women's relation-
ships in ways the larger culture tends to
ignore," explains Diamant.
Kathleen McCormack Levine, 59,
and Joyce Tabachnik, 42, first meet at
Shabbat services in a Gloucester syna-
gogue
aocrue on a summer evening. The two
- women begin to chat as they share the
last Geneva cookie, and their conversa-
tion flows effortlessly in a way that sug,-
gests the potential for a deeper connec-
tion.
They continue to meet and walk and
talk and listen, uncovering many layers
of their lives.
Diamant's skill is in making her char-
acters seem real, their dialogue natural.
Kathleen, a children's librarian who is
the mother of two sons and a third who
was killed in a car accident in child-
hood, is happily married and has lived
in Gloucester for almost 35 years. She's
undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
Joyce, a writer who has shifted from
journalism to fiction and is having trou-
ble on her second novel, is the mother
of a sharp-edged 12-year-old daughter;
she and her overworked husband seem
to be growing distant.
She's used the proceeds of her success-
ful first romance novel to buy a week-
end cottage in Gloucester. The previous
tenants left an avoca-
do-colored refrigera-
tor in the kitchen
and a 5-foot-high
statue of the Virgin
Mary on the front
lawn.
The ocean is never
very far away in
Good Harbor, and
readers can hear the
sound of the water
breaking on the
shore and smell the
GOOD HARBOR
salty air. The novel
takes place over the
course of a spring
and summer, and
short chapters alter-
AN ITA
nate between the
DIAMANT
perspectives of the
two women, as if the
narrator was shifting
from a perch on the
shoulder of one to the shoulder of the
other.
As they share practical advice and
secrets kept from their families, they
sustain and in some ways save each
other.
In writing about breast cancer,
Diamant consulted experts including
physicians, social workers and survivors
to make sure she got the details about
the emotional and medical course of
treatment correctly. When asked what
drew her to this theme, she replies, "It's
part of our landscape."
Judaism is natural to the book's set-
THE RED TENT