Other Men's Daughters

(Paperback, Main)

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For almost six years the Merriwethers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, have been living a lie. Sarah and Robert still share the old house on Acorn Street, wooden, gabled, bellied with bay windows. Nights they can be found gathered in the parlor, reading in their favorite roosts. One summer changes the direction of their lives. Sarah has taken the children to Maine, but for the first time in years Robert stays behind to work. A doctor and physiologist, it has been two years since he's done work that has absorbed him. A strange, released summer. He eats alone, plays tennis occasionally or rows on the Charles River, reads books that he hasn't looked at since his youth and walks the "Jammed, astonishing summer streets." His energy turns inward and Merriweather the "Longtime skeptic living in a sea of skepticism" finds Cynthia Ryder, a young summer student who renews his passion and helps him to redefine his life. Other Men's Daughters explores the theme that men are most alike in their most passionate times, but that most men diffuse the passions that first sustained them.

Reviews

As if Chekhov had written Lolita. . . . I would contend that in its own felicitous small-scale way, Other Mens Daughters is to . . . the sixties what The Great Gatsby was to the twenties, The Grapes of Wrath to the thirties, and Rabbit Is Rich to the seventies: a microscope exactly focused on a definitive specimen of what was once the present American moment.Philip Roth, from the Introduction

A novel so good it would have been one of the most valid contenders for the Great American Novel of the decade. It may have achieved in a sane, civilized, academic and romantic way what its showier contemporaries miss by a mile.
Ann Rosenberg, The Philadelphia Inquirer

It is a pleasure to find a novel written with such intelligence and feeling, a novel that judges none of its people but holds them up to calm and affectionate scrutiny. Other Mens Daughters . . . is relevantbut its real subject is in the disruptions and exaltation of the human heart.
Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

Richard Sterns style is the mark of an exceptional and delicate attention. Other Mens Daughters is...an impressive pleas for the private life as a continuing subject for serious fiction...there is urgency and power in Sterns treatment of his profound theme: the necessary end of particular seasons in our lives, the pain and confusion and exhilaration of leaving safe old places when they have become truly uninhabitable. Michael Wood, The New York Review of Books

This is the best novel about divorce and the anguish of a lost family that I have ever read. Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions, at the University of Chicago

A flower-fresh, moon-bright novel...the author being one of those who can convey all of Eros in a snip of dialogue, a few sentences.Cosmopolitan

No novelist could improve upon Richard Sterns inventory of what Merriwether has to lose...an attractive book and occasionally and extraordinarily touching one.Time

I think Other Mens Daughters is an important book, one of the few that will be read later. It is brilliantly written, a true novel of manners, sharply observant of surfaces, and, finally, profound. Herbert Wilner

Sterns accomplishment (here, as in all his work) is to locate precisely the comedy and the pains of a particularly contemporary phenomenon without exaggeration, animus, or operatic ideology.... In all, it is as if Chekhov had written Lolita.... I would hold that in its own felicitous way, Other Mens Daughters is to the sixties what The Great Gatsby was to the twenties, The Grapes of Wrath to the thirties, and Rabbit Is Rich to the eighties: a microscope exactly focused upon a thinly sliced specimen of what was once the present moment. Philip Roth

The novels world rings true...we respond to the honesty of Sterns vision. Chicago Daily News

For years I have admired the elegant fiction of Richard Stern for its impeccable language, its gracious erudition, and, above all, its brilliant wit. In Other Mens Daughters, to me his most moving novel, these qualities serve the cause of mercy. Thomas Berger

Author Bio

Richard Stern (1928-2013) was the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including short stories, essays, and novels. Stern taught literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago from 1955 until retiring in 2001. Philip Roth is the author of thirty-one books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner American Pastoral.