What wisdom she has is hard won through suffering, but she’s still standing. Yet she recognizes these tendencies in herself and sometimes overcomes her stubbornness enough to backtrack and apologize. Hagar is harsh-tongued and bitter, always looking for someone or something to blame. “The night my son died I was transformed to stone and never wept at all,” she remembers. The stone angel of the title is the monument on Hagar’s mother’s grave, but it is also an almost oxymoronic description for our protagonist herself. We hadn’t a scrap of subtlety between us”) her volatile marriage to Bram, a common fellow considered unworthy of her (“Twenty-four years, in all, were scoured away like sand-banks under the spate of our wrangle and bicker”) and the untimely deaths of both a brother and a son.

Many of these are melancholy: her mother’s early death and her difficult relationship with her father, an arrogant, self-made shopkeeper (“Both of us were blunt as bludgeons. While in a doctor’s waiting room or in the derelict house by the coast where she runs away to escape the threat of the nursing home, she loses the drift of the present and in her growing confusion relives episodes from earlier life. “I am rampant with memory,” Hagar says, and as the book proceeds she keeps lapsing back, seemingly involuntarily, into her past. This is one of those novels where the first-person voice draws you in immediately. But don’t expect Hagar to give in without a fight. What with a recent fall, gallbladder issues and pesky constipation, the old woman’s health is getting to be more than Doris can handle at home. Now 90 years old, she has already lived with her son Marvin and his wife Doris for 17 years when they spring a surprise on her: they want to sell the house and move somewhere smaller, and they mean to send her to Silver Threads nursing home. Hagar Shipley has earned the right to be curmudgeonly.

The stone angel book review