Monoosook Valley

Monoosook Valley paperback jacket

Description:

Set in a small New Hampshire town in the year 1971, Monoosook Valley is the story of a thirty-five-year-old woman – and mother of two teenage children – coming out of the deep freeze she’s been in since the untimely death of her husband twelve years earlier.

Shirley Morrison runs the Curly Q – a local hair salon that caters to the upper class women in town. Her son Tucker smokes too much pot and protests the Vietnam War, while her daughter Joanie spends long evenings “at the library,” then walks through the front door smelling faintly of sex. Her closest friend is the newcomer Marty Schwartz, a writer from New York whose lifestyle is at odds with the town’s conservative base. Shirley seems perfectly content to drift along giving shampoos and policing her kids – until a snowy night in April, when her familiar and comforting patterns dissolve in newly rekindled passion.

Praise:

“With wonderful detail and marvelous dialogue, Hyde (Her Native Colors) expertly chronicles the bittersweet liberation of Shirley Morrison.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Hyde is interested not just in the confusion of those times, but in the particulars of confusion, the specific collisions between politics and personal life, and between growing up and dropping out. As in her first novel, Her Native Colors (1986), she displays a remarkable gift for characterization and for moving gracefully in and out of several viewpoints.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Hyde doesn’t make it easy for anyone in this novel, but she makes it real. Her characters change as they grow and experience new events. That’s life, and Hyde clearly and sympathetically illuminates life’s process.”

—The Chicago Tribune

“Displaying insight and compassion and touches of bittersweet humor, in Monoosook Valley – a homey, folksy novel – Hyde unfolds the liberation of Shirley Morrison while re-evoking an era of monumental unrest.”

—Newport News, VA Press

Excerpt:

From Chapter 5: Yellow Star

These days, of course, the war in Vietnam was on everybody’s minds. It was 1971, after all, and so even here in Monoosook – twelve thousand miles from the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta – maple leaves changed color and snow fell and daffodils bloomed, and all the while everyone talked about the war: about Tet, and Vietnamization, and Mylai; about LBJ’s bailing out; about Spiro Agnew and the student demonstrators and the tragedy at Kent State.

Monoosook was a conservative town in a conservative state; as the rest of the country grew more opposed to the war, the elders here held fast to the Domino Theory. They had elected Richard Nixon by a landslide back in 1968, and they were genuinely optimistic about his policy of Vietnamization, his ultimate goal of peace with honor. We can’t abandon the South Vietnamese just like that, was the prevailing view; sure, we should end the war but we can’t simply walk out on them and let the Communists take over. For once Vietnam goes, one by one they’re all going to topple.

Which is not to say that the town had been pushing its boys into combat. Often while a father might be lecturing his son on the need to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam, the mother would be finagling with college-admissions committees, or talking to ministers, or explaining her son’s allergies to the family doctor – all the while hoping for that college deferment, that CO status, that 4-f classification. Nobody wanted Greg, or Donald, or Roger, to go to Vietnam. And in fact very few sons actually went. They got those student deferments, and they got those medical exemptions. And those who didn’t – well, Monoosook stood behind them and sent them off with a hero’s farewell.

Naturally, in this kind of a setting, anyone in town who spoke out against the war was viewed with suspicion. In fact, many of the townspeople – Charley Bates among them – believed the antiwar movement was firmly linked to the government of North Vietnam. Still, though, Monoosook did have its own outspoken activists. Sally Luty (who made the ham loaf for Charley’s funeral) was one. Herself a widow, she had lost a son during Tet, and these days she would stand outside the grocery store during heat waves and during blizzards, handing out her leaflets. Or rather, trying to hand them out. Most everyone smiled, remembering Roger (a bit of a rabble-rouser, actually), but they would shake their heads politely, turn away, and go on wheeling their overladen grocery carts out to their station wagons.

And Marty Schwartz was another. After three years people still didn’t know what to make of Marty. They were generally mistrustful, because he was from New York, and because he was a writer, and because he was Jewish; but despite all that, they couldn’t dislike him. They were too afraid of him to dislike him; he seemed to know more than they did, about everything. And besides, he was so nice, always asking about the grandfather’s prostate condition, or Aunt Sue’s appetite. So that when Marty handed out a leaflet, they took it. Maybe they dropped it into a puddle of slush or threw it away with the grocery receipts, but they took it.

Actually, most of the town’s antiwar sentiment was to be found at the high school, where you could see a few black armbands, or peace signs, or old Eugene McCarthy bumper stickers. Not a lot, but enough to lend some counterpoint to the more conservative editorials in The Monoosook Valley News. Of course, protesting the war and smoking pot went hand-in-hand; and so people like Rick and Ron DeCoto and Hunter Greene and Stevie Winslow were still largely convinced that their parents were right, that U.S. policies in Southeast Asia were as sound as granite. Not so with Bernie and Tucker. For a while the school had enforced a rule that forbade anyone to hang any kind of a political statement on the outside of his or her locker. But as with the September Haircut Revolution, Bernie broke the rule, fought a brief battle, and won; and these days his locker was plastered with antiwar and related messages. “Stop the War Now” read one slogan. “Free Bobby Seale” read another. “How Many More?” (At one point he put up a poster that read “If you were being raped, would you ask for gradual withdrawal?” But here the administration drew the line. Free speech was one thing, obscenity another.) Tucker himself constructed an elegant peace sign, using orange poster-board and fluorescent green tape. He glued on glitter and sequins, and on dark days you could see it sparkling from one end of the long gloomy basement corridor to the other.

Joanie, on the other hand, had a more pragmatic attitude. She considered herself just as much against the war as her brother and Bernie and Marty, but in her view what good did it do to plaster your locker with “Dump Nixon” stickers? All it did was give the school administration reason to put you under some kind of surveillance. Not that she would have minded; it would have been a kind of honor. But putting up signs just seemed pointless. The war was going to continue on whatever course the President chose, regardless of any sign that a fifteen-year-old girl in Monoosook Valley, New Hampshire, stuck on her locker door.

Tucker argued vehemently with her.

“What if everyone acted like you?” he demanded. “Do you think there would have been anything like the Mobe? Do you think there would have been the march on Washington?”

“No,” Joanie admitted.

“That’s right,” Tucker said, growing more agitated. “People have to speak up, people have to make themselves heard. Or else everyone begins to believe that there is a Silent Majority out there.”

“But other people do speak up,” Joanie said. “Everybody doesn’t act like I do.”

“You don’t really care about this, do you?” Tucker said. “You’re never going to get drafted, why should you bother?”

Joanie was silent. Tucker was wrong, of course. She did care. She had a brother. He could die over there. It was just that putting up signs in the high school and leafleting the souped-up bombers in the parking lot seemed so futile. It was sad to her, really, this handful of protesters in such a right-wing town.

She let out a sigh. “Oh, Tucker, if we lived somewhere else I’d put up signs,” she said. “Say we lived in Boston, or Berkeley – then there might be some point. Everyone else would be doing it; we’d make an impact. But here?” She held up a copy of The Monoosook Valley News. “Too Cold for the Easter Bunny?” read the headline. Joanie shook her head. “What’s the use?”

Reviews

From Publishers Weekly:

In a small New Hampshire town, 35-year-old Shirley Morrison is raising two teenagers (from a marriage that ended with her husband’s death in a freak boating accident) and running her business, the Curly Q beauty parlor. The year is 1971, and drugs, sexual freedom and anti-war fervor are in the headlines, as well as a presence in conservative little Monoosook. As Morrison seeks to keep her children on the straight and narrow (she checks the bathroom for tampon applicators “just to make sure Joanie was still needing them” and knows from reading Good Housekeeping that when Tucker comes home late and eats everything in sight, including the leftover tuna casserole, that something illicit is being smoked), she finds herself caught up in a new existence. Although she prefers single motherhood to her former life with her moody late husband, she is falling in love with Marty Schwartz, a frizzy-haired, marijuana-using New York writer seeking solitude in the Concord State. With wonderful detail and marvelous dialogue, Hyde (Her Native Colors) expertly chronicles the bittersweet liberation of Shirley Morrison.

From the San Francisco Chronicle (by Hans Ostrom):

“Monoosook Valley” is not just another Vietnam book. Exploring the Vietnam era from the vantage point of a small New Hampshire town, Elisabeth Hyde’s second novel is precisely focused on believable, quirky characters.

Springtime in Monoosook, 1971: Shirley Morrison – hairdresser and widowed mother of two teenagers – has just watched her father die of cancer. Her son, Tucker, smokes a lot of pot, quarrels with “the good boys” in the high school and glances furtively toward the Canadian border as the college deferment evaporates.

Shirley’s daughter, Joanie, breaks up with a groping boyfriend and suspects that the war protests, in addition to being necessary, may also be self-serving and ineffectual. Later, a soldier returns from Vietnam, and Joanie befriends him. Meanwhile, despite her better instincts, Shirley falls in love with a writer who is radical and, worse, a newcomer to the small town.

The plot never thickens, at least not in any predictable or melodramatic way. Instead, Hyde interweaves 16 vignettes that take place over two months (and in flashbacks) in the lives of these characters. She does not try to remember everything about 1971, nor does she recall openly what she thinks we want her to recall.

She conducts a careful archeological dig into the near past and brings back an authentic reconstruction of a small American town in troubled times.

Hyde is interested not just in the confusion of those times, but in the particulars of confusion, the specific collisions between politics and personal life, and between growing up and dropping out. As in her first novel, Her Native Colors (1986), she displays a remarkable gift for characterization and for moving gracefully in and out of several viewpoints.

Like a good maker of documentaries, Hyde sets intelligent limits and lets details accrue. Her portraits of the two teenagers are as exact and believable as that of the middle-aged hairdresser, and she gives us memorable glimpses of small-town cops and handsome scholar-athletes who keep their hair short and pledge allegiance to the Domino Theory.

Throughout, Hyde never mentions a song title, a 1960s icon or piece of slang for its own sake. She is out to recover the past, not to market it.

While the multiple points of view enrich the novel, they may create discomfort for some readers. At times one wants the novel to be Shirley’s and Shirley’s alone, at others, Tucker’s and Tucker’s alone. These quibbles do not diminish the honesty, the astonishing precision and the wry wit of Monoosook Valley, though.

Reader’s Guide Questions

  1. Shirley is very much the “local girl”, born and bred in the small town of Monoosook Valley. What draws her to somebody like Marty Schwartz?
  2. Do you think Tucker matures very much over the course of the novel? Discuss. Where do you think he will be in five years?
  3. What do you think Joanie sees in the character of Jeffrey Greene, the Vietnam vet?
  4. Joanie’s ex-boyfriend Stu continues to stalk Joanie, much in the same way Bill Branson stalks Megan in The Abortionist’s Daughter. Sometimes a certain kind of character keeps popping up in an author’s body of work. Discuss.

↓ Book info…

Monoosook Valley
US Paperback
Monoosook Valley
Buy online
→ Read an excerpt