In Maryanne Stahl’s Forgive the Moon, Stahl depicts the seemingly complex life of a middle-aged woman, Amanda Kincaid, who relishes in her get-away to a much-wanted and needed prolonged summer vacation spot in Long Island, New York. Throughout the extension of the novel, Kincaid begins to rediscover herself and the obscured truth behind her innermost desires and yearnings. As Kincaid’s unconventional, yet enticing family surround her throughout Kincaid’s temporary escape from reality, she finds herself confronting the same relapsing issues she had so desperately attempted to evade.
Through Kincaid’s stirring and encouraging journey to introspection
and understanding, one is easily able to associate with Kincaid’s fundamentally
universal and mutual dilemmas such as marital pressures, familial tensions, and
irrepressible inner wishes. In Stahl’s laudable literary work, she truly establishes
a very heartfelt and meaningful literary work that truly embodies the harsh and
unremitting impediments, devastations, and misfortunes that one may unpredictably
endure in life, despite one’s unwavering drive to elude them permanently. Stahl’s
amplification of the unalterable reappearance of the woes and sorrows of one’s
life serves to expose the firmness and determination one must possess in order
to approach one’s encumbrances in the most constructive and optimistic way, and
come to terms with the unpredictability of life and what the future holds. In
other words, Stahl skillfully shapes a story that implies and signifies some
particular insight about life and our awareness and recognition of its impact
on us and the people around us. Overall, Stahl’s realistic, inventive, and
inspiring interpretation of the reality of life through Amanda Kincaid’s chaotic
life evidently suggests the makings of a worthy literary fiction novel that by
no means deceives the creditable title of a work deserving literary merit.
Likewise, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls competently fulfills the requirements of a
well-deserving novel earning literary merit in its entirety. The representation
of the work as a cleverly disguised revelation regarding the decisions one
might face in one’s life truly validates the significance of this novel as a
unique and inventive piece of literary fiction that has the capacity to
captivate the reader’s attention while enlightening the reader with a universal
declaration about life. In effect, Russo’s novel encapsulates very plausible
events and comprehensions of life that are likely to occur to anybody through
the character of a humble and modest man named Miles Roby. Russo vividly
deciphers this universal element through the conventional and rather mundane life
of Roby as he undergoes the same day-to-day routines, such as running the
Empire Grill, in the small and secluded town of Empire Falls, Maine. Russo
proficiently portrays the intimate bond we tend to inadvertently form with our habitual
activities in an attempt to cope with our problems while skirting any type of
change in our lives. By depicting the life of an ordinary middle-aged man and
the decisions he must face in salvaging the broken pieces of his love life,
healing the wounds in his familial relationships, uncovering the significance
of the events in his past, and seeking to mend fences with his former enemies,
Russo is fully able to capture the essence of a literary fiction in Empire Falls and its function to unveil
frank realities of life.
