Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

 

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

Fiction

2017

Finished on December 8, 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)

Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love.

Publisher's Blurb:

It’s the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is about to take a walk.

As she traverses a grittier Manhattan, a city anxious after an attack by a still-at-large subway vigilante, she encounters bartenders, bodega clerks, chauffeurs, security guards, bohemians, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be—in surprising moments of generosity and grace. While she strolls, Lillian recalls a long and eventful life that included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America—a career cut short by marriage, motherhood, divorce, and a breakdown.

A love letter to city life—however shiny or sleazy—Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk was slow to pull me in, but I didn't give up, and I wound up enjoying the story although it didn't wow me. I enjoy novels about women in their later years, but this story fell just shy of being one that I could love. One of my favorite things to do when visiting a new town or city is to wander up and down the streets, exploring neighborhoods and business districts. I've walked numerous miles in Victoria, Banff, Jasper, Port Townsend, Jackson, and London, to name a few. When my daughter and I were in NYC many years ago, we walked from our lovely hotel (The Peninsula) on 5th Avenue up to the Guggenheim Museum, then back down 5th all the way to Battery Park. Along the way, we admired St. Patrick's Cathedral, the New York Public Library, the Flatiron Building, and the World Trade Center. We took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and then over to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. After more than eight miles, we were exhausted and caught a cab back to our hotel. And thus, I was happy to discover a map of Lillian's route of her New Year's Eve walk in NYC, and couldn't help but notice that it was very similar to the one we took in 1996! 

Other than the premise of spending New Year's Eve walking across Manhattan, I doubt I'll remember very many details about this book. But, if I make it back to NYC, I'd love to retrace Lillian's steps.

Rules of Civility

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Fiction
2012 Penguin Books (first published in 2011)
Finished on July 3, 2018
Rating:  4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel her on a yearlong journey toward the upper echelons of New York society--where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.

Bravo! I have a new favorite author. A Gentleman in Moscow (which I wrote about here) was my #1 read in 2017, and as soon as I finished reading it for the second time (in preparation of my book club's discussion), I knew I had to read Towles' earlier novel, Rules of Civility. I loved both stories! Towles' prose is smart and luxurious and I found myself reading slowly, savoring each sentence. I enjoyed the wit and charm of A Gentleman in Moscow and I am in awe of this author's debut novel. What talent!

A favorite passage:

Powdered with snow, Washington Square looked as lovely as it could. The snow had dusted every tree and gate. The once tony brownstones that on summer days now lowered their gaze in misery were lost for the moment in sentimental memories. At No. 25, a curtain on the second floor was drawn back and the ghost of Edith Wharton looked out with shy envy. Sweet, insightful, unsexed, she watched the three of us pass wondering when the love that she had so artfully imagined would work up the courage to rap on her door. When would it present itself at an inconvenient hour, insist upon being admitted, brush past the butler and rush up the Puritan staircase urgently calling her name?

I am eager to read another book by Amor Towles and am happy to know that he's busy working on his third novel, which sound wonderful!

I am still in the process of outlining my next book, but I suspect it will follow three eighteen-year-old boys on their way from the Midwest to New York City in the early 1950s… (Amor Towles)

Rules of Civility in a very easy way captures the casual motions of your early twenties that become both foundations and causalities--the small actions or inactions that become decisions before you realized you were deciding anything at all.... This book is filled with little moments that seem very right.... It's all the more surprising that this fictional young woman is so well caught by this man so new to the game, Amor Towles. ~The Atlantic

Summer at Tiffany

Summer at Tiffany by Majorie Hart
Memoir
2007 HarperCollins
Finished on 9/10/13
Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)





Publisher’s Blurb:

New York City, 1945. Marjorie Jacobson and her best friend, Marty Garrett, arrive fresh from the Kappa house at the University of Iowa hoping to find summer positions as shopgirls. Turned away from the top department stores, they miraculously find jobs as pages at Tiffany & Co., becoming the first women to ever work on the sales floor, a diamond-filled day job replete with Tiffany-blue shirtwaist dresses from Bonwit Teller's—and the envy of all their friends.

Looking back on that magical time in her life, Marjorie takes us back to when she and Marty rubbed elbows with the rich and famous, pinched pennies to eat at the Automat, experienced nightlife at La Martinique, and danced away their weekends with dashing midshipmen. Between being dazzled by Judy Garland's honeymoon visit to Tiffany, celebrating VJ Day in Times Square, and mingling with Café society, she fell in love, learned unforgettable lessons, made important decisions that would change her future, and created the remarkable memories she now shares with all of us.

Infused with numerous historical details (including a New York Times article about a B-25 Army bomber crashing into the Empire State Building on July 28th!), this memoir turned out to be more substantial than I had anticipated. The chapters about WWII were moving, particularly Hart’s recollections about VJ Day and celebrating in Times Square with over two million people. It’s a quick and charming read, but not sentimental or sappy, and one which, I believe, will stay with me for a long time.

Author’s Note:

Summer at Tiffany is the story of a summer that I have never forgotten. Whenever I had a down moment in my life, the simple recollection of memories from the summer of 1945 was always sustaining. From the faint smell of the Hudson River from the top of a bus, to climbing the steps from a dark subway into the light, to the Tiffany show windows of diamonds spilling from velvet cases and the welcoming smile of the gentleman who clocked us in each day—these remembrances of my Summer at Tiffany continue always to embrace me, and bring a smile to my face.


Final Thoughts:

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir! World War II is drawing to a close and the atmosphere in New York City is lively and exciting. Marjorie struggles to make ends meet, but she’s having the summer of her life, working in the glamorous Tiffany, meeting famous movie stars, and falling in love. Summer at Tiffany is a delightful read and I found myself lingering over the pages, not wanting to finish too quickly. This is one to share with your mothers and grandmothers. Highly recommend.

For Fun:

Amy

July 1996

(she was obsessed with Audrey Hepburn 

and Breakfast at Tiffany's that summer)

Personal Trivia Tidbits:

It wasn’t until I began reading Summer at Tiffany that I discovered that the author was the former chairman of the Fine Arts Department at the University of San Diego. I attended USD in 1980! I also learned that she lived in Del Mar (where I grew up!) and later moved to La Mesa, which is near the town of Santee, where Rod & I lived when we were first married. Small world!