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True to Form by Elizabeth Berg Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Growing Pains Each of the 200+ pages in Elizabeth Berg’s new novel, True to Form, will bring pleasure to a reader. Berg reprises the heroine she introduced in earlier books, Katie Nash, as narrator of True to Form, and this voice presents the anxieties of adolescence and friendship with a delicacy and poignancy that will ring true for most readers. The theme of what home is weaves throughout the book. Here’s an excerpt of Katie’s reflection about home as she prepares for a trip to Texas, the place she lived before moving to Missouri, for a visit with her friend Cherylanne: “I start thinking of going out with Cherylanne and a funny thing happens: I think of Cynthia instead. How I will miss her. How I might send her a postcard. I guess it has become home here, now. There are reasons for coming back. I have the responsibility of my jobs, and there is the interesting dilemma of how to save Cynthia from a mother gone berserk. It’s so amazing how that happens, place after place. When you’re dad is in the army, it’s like you’re always saying, ‘Okay, this is home.’ And then, ‘No. This is home.’ And so on and so on forever. But the joke is that you are never home except inside yourself. That is where you have to make the place with the light always on, a chair always waiting, sit down. It is always the same light, and it is always the same chair, turned just so and never moving one inch.” Every dozen or so pages, there’s an insight, or an observation, that leads a reader to take a deep breath, or smile, or just pause and enjoy the feeling evoked by Berg’s well-crafted words. Here’s an excerpt of Katie’s reflections upon leaving a nursing home visit she made to see Mrs. Randolph, for whom Katie cared for a few weeks prior to the sudden death of Mr. Randolph: “I think of Mrs. Randolph looking at me so serious, telling me I have to forgive myself. Then I think of Mr. Randolph and his suspenders, and the way he looked when he saw his wife with her hair curled. Their living room, with the triangle pillows. Gone, really, even though it is still there. Movers will come soon, Mrs. Randolph told me, to take their things away. Then the house will be empty, and then new people will be there. A little time will pass and then it will seem like the new people have always been there. The way time and situations shift is a mystery of life. The way you can’t count on anything staying, that’s a sadness. Only yesterday, I saw white hairs in Bones’s muzzle. I lay beside him, petting him, feeling so bad that he is getting old. For his part, he just wagged his tail and enjoyed the petting, which is what I mean about animals. They don’t pace around, worrying. All they do is say, fine.” Katie Nash grows during the summer covered on the pages of True to Form, and her growth will remind you of your own as you turn the pages of this fine novel. Steve Hopkins, June 19, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2002 issue of Executive Times Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com