sewn paper
Fiction
1994
192 pages
ISBN 0-88984-178-0
$14.95
Onlyville
Cynthia Holz
The story of a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous Watergate years.
When Anna Berman leaves her boyfriend Sal and heads for
the family cottage on an island
off Cape Cod, she
expects solitude and time to think. What
she does not expect are uninvited house guests - first Sal,
then her teenage niece and a strange friend, and
finally her father's girlfriend.
Anna is drawn into a tumult of precarious relationships,
both present and past, and is challenged by ambivalent feelings
and shifting allegiances.
`It is 1974, Richard Nixon is on the hot seat and Anna Berman is off to Onlyville.
The island, cottage, summer home of her childhood and present-day refuge, it's ``a blank
space, a hole in time, a place to enter and rest in.'' ... There in the cottage of her
childhood, where the past seems to seep through the very floorboards, Anna squares off
with her own history while the mess of big-h History - Watergate - unravels all about
her ...' `Onlyville opens in 1974 on the eastern seaboard of the United States against
the background of the Watergate scandal and the pulsating pressure to impeach Richard Nixon.
But all that is merely white noise for Anna Berman, who is floundering in her own turbid
crisis. At 29, she has most of an undergraduate degree, a non-career as a temp, and an aging
and overwhelming lover, Sal, a paranoid Korean War vet. In desperation Anna flees to her family's
abandoned cottage in Onlyville. She dives into her past, hoping to emerge refreshed and unfettered
by the ghost of her mother, who one day, years before, left Anna sitting on the beach, watching,
while she swam away until she disappeared.' `In telling Anna's tale, Holz moves back and forth through layers of time,
revealing her family's past, their mistakes and marriages over three
decades. ... Onlyville is no lightweight beach novel.
Holz's characters vibrate with ambiguities, their actions posing questions
that will have no answer. ... Ultimately, Onlyville is
a compassionate story of a woman's quest for understanding. `To anyone contemplating writing a novel about family, modern life and how social
and political movements shape destinies: Read and cherish Onlyville.
Book lovers, savor this handsomely produced book, illustrated with a dozen exquisite engravings
by G. Brender à Brandis. And readers, be grateful for Cynthia Holz, who has the gift.'
- The Globe and Mail
- Quill & Quire
- The Toronto Star
- The Ottawa Citizen
