Description Where to Buy Excerpt Reviews Quotes DESCRIPTION Set in 1929, before the Crash, Paradise Farm probes the disintegration and rebirth of a wealthy Jewish family at a time when the New York art world was in ferment, women's roles were changing, the psychoanalytic movement was burgeoning--and Hitler's menace was recognized only by a prescient few. Paperback, 250 pages. ISBN 0-7914-4100-8 (SUNY Press, March 2000) Jacketed hardcover. ISBN 0-7914-4099-0 (SUNY Press, February 1999) WHERE TO BUY --Amazon.com --SUNY Press --Barnes and Noble EXCERPT --Courtesy of The Alsop Review REVIEWS The Alsop Review by Jack Foley... Publishers Weekly In the spring of 1929, just before the stock market crash, a young woman struggles to achieve independence from a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family whose neurotic needs have tremendous psychic impact. Webster (Sins of the Mothers) crafts a coming-of-age tale exploring the psychological underpinnings of a family's dramatic life changes in a historically portentous moment. Using a spare prose style resonant with clues to the catastrophic times ahead, Webster deftly conveys a period of social history when women began voicing their sexual needs, unconventional values were infiltrating social norms and new art movements and Freudian psychoanalysis was becoming chic among the intelligentsia. From Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 1999 Second-novelist Webster (Sins of the Mothers, 1993) paints an appealing, if not wholly compelling, portrait of the sexual mores, intellectual habits, and bohemian aspirations of an upper-class Jewish family in 1929 New York. With the death of patriarch Eugene, Agnes and her grown children Lara and Johnnie lease the big house to David and his pregnant wife Muriel, two early converts to psychoanalysis who hope to turn the house and expansive grounds into a mental health center for disturbed children. While David and Muriel first focus their efforts on Robin, a young girl hesitating on the brink of autism, their attention gravitates also to Agnes troubled family, now quartered in the big houses adjacent cottage. Agnes has begun a slightly sadomasochistic affair with the much younger Walter, a German baron with eyes for American wealth, while Lara, a struggling painter, holds a modern womans views and conducts a random love life to prove it, though a childhood affair with her brother has tainted her perception of everything. Then theres Johnnie, a brilliant engineer who escapes from the world by designing and flying kites on the farmand whos deemed crazy because of his obsession with the political instability of Germany. Though his distress at the worlds growing anti-Semitism is well founded, his self-obsessed mother and flapper sister think that his recitations of Mein Kampf do little more than suggest his inability to get along with all concerned. Amid the familys turbulence, Webster evokes the times these characters live inthe lure of Harlem nightclubs and Florida land speculation, the excitement of the new talking cure, and the burgeoning influence of cubism. The story hardly lacks for drama, but an odd emotional restraint seems even so to cauterize the characters in midstep. Engaging, though a certain essential vivacity is missing. -- Copyright (c)1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. QUOTES "What I find most compelling in this novel is the sensitive portrayal of complex psychological processes, a portrayal which is surgical in its accuracy, yet also deeply compassionate. The descriptions of Lara's absorption in her painting rival those of Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthousedescribes the ruminations of Lily Briscoe. There is a seriousness, depth, and intensity to this novel which give it a riveting, sometimes even hallucinatory quality. Yet the world it is anchored in is solidly real. Webster manages to evoke a specific social milieu and historical period (somewhat like Doctorow in Ragtime) while also entering into the inner psychological worlds of her characters with particular perceptiveness and intensity. The result is a novel of rare power both to disturb and reveal." -- Madelon Sprengnether, author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis "In this tale of bohemian life entre deux guerres, a woman artist finds a way to articulate the unspeakable. Spare and stirring--a wonderful novel." -- Diane Wood Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton: A Biography "An intriguing portrait of the artist as a young woman of means and genius. Loosely basing her narrative on the life story of her mother, the distinguished modernist painter Ethel Schwabacher, Brenda Webster traces her heroine's evolution from dutiful art student to avant-garde innovator, at the same time offering incisive portraits of the haute-bourgeois Jewish intellectuals who inhabit 'Paradise Farm' at the tumultuous end of the 1920s." -- Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author of the Madwoman in the Attic: A Study of Women and the Literary Imagination in the Nineteenth Century "Paradise Farm is one of those rare historical novels that also manages to be naturally and persuasively contemporary. It vividly evokes the life of East Coast artists and intellectuals toward the end of the 1920s, at a moment when modernism was in full bloom, psychoanalysis in its first great American vogue, and the shadow of the imminent stock market crash scarcely perceived. At the same time, Paradise Farm gives us the portrait of a young woman's coming of age as an artist that speaks powerfully to our own era." -- Robert Alter, author of Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age "Paradise Farm gives you the feel of a dysfunctional family in the late 1920s--a distant mysterious father, a sexually repressed mother, two incestuous siblings. The narrative intersects with the founding of a mental health center, whose only patient is an autistic child, and is played out against the broader international context of escalating anti-Semitism in fascist Germany. A stimulating read on every level." -- Irvin D. Yalom, M.D., author of Lying on the Couch