Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Featuring: Oliver Marbalestier; Virginia Marbalestier; Jill Marbalestier
278 pages ISBN: 1480463310 EAN: 9781480463318 Kindle: B00HUILO6E Paperback / e-Book Add to Wish List
Virginia married Oliver Marbalestier, a research scientist;
now he's a textile firm's commercial manager. Her
background in a trailer park led to a fierce desire to
succeed and rebel; in California, she took it for granted
that the pop singers and eccentrics were the establishment.
As a student she married an Englishman, never dreaming that
they would end up comparatively wealthy.
RAW SILK follows the path of the marriage, told by Virginia
with an almost disinterested air, the charge of excitement
only filling her words when she tries transferring her
flower paintings to silk screen printing and becomes a
pattern designer for the firm. Living in England, she
doesn't fit in to the sedate cocktail parties with other
company couples, but accepts that she needs to play the
game. Then she and Oliver row over where to send their
wilful daughter Jill to school, among other matters. I
found it funny and snobbish that they name the dog
Phaideaux - pronounced Fido.
My favourite character is a designer named Malcolm. Chatty
and talented, he designs beautiful prints and camps it up
when he wants to be funny. As he's no threat to the
marriage he becomes Virginia's friend and she starts
working in a studio next to his. This is better than the
chilly life she now leads at home. A new assistant, a
college dropout, is anorexic and heavily depressed by
existential anguish, so creditably Virginia tries to help
this girl; the counterside is that her marriage is sliding
fast into non-communication and emptiness. Oliver turns out
to be an appalling snob. Virginia, absorbed in her art,
turns out to be a plagiarist and thief.
In the telling I kept feeling similarities to Lionel
Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. I can see no
reason why Virginia did not request a divorce. The final
section, set in Japan, feels the least convincing. The
times are carefully described; the three ages of looms from
Victorian on, still in use; the gradual devouring of the
textile industry by Eastern firms with their cheap labour
and consequent ill-feeling among the British labour force.
Shot through with information, such as that cloth is a
product with high value relative to weight, we learn a
great deal from RAW SILK, including that our choices do not
always make us happy. Janet Burroway has written several
novels and plays, and this assured novel of three contrasts
- American, English and Japanese - will reward the
thoughtful reader.
Janet Burroway’s critically acclaimed novel, which the New
Yorker hailed as “enormously enjoyable” and Newsweek called
“a novel of rare and lustrous quality,” is the story of a
woman whose unraveling marriage sends her on a personal
odyssey halfway around the world to Japan
Virginia Marbalestier has come a long way from the
California trailer park where she grew up. Now a designer at
the textile firm where her husband is the number-two
executive, as the mother of a young daughter and the
mistress of an English Tudor manor, she has it all. But her
husband, Oliver, is becoming increasingly elitist and
controlling, resentful of her friendships, and rough in bed.
The arrival of a new employee, a distressed young woman in
whom Virginia finds the missing threads of her own identity,
and the firm’s possible merger with a Japanese competitor
heighten the tensions between Virginia and Oliver, and impel
Virginia to set off on a foreign adventure that will change
her life forever
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