The World Below (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Sue Miller
- First Published: 2001
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The early 1900’s and the late twentieth centuy to 2000
- Setting: Maine, Vermont, and California
- Principal Characters: Georgia Rice, Catherine “Cath” Hubbard, Seward Wallace, John Holbrooke, Peter, Joe, Rue Rice, Samuel Eliasson, Jessie
- Genres: Long fiction, Domestic realism
- Subjects: North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Suicide, Twentieth century, New England, California, West, U.S., Women, Grandparents or grandchildren, Tuberculosis, Hospitals, Maine, Vermont
- Locales: California, Maine, Vermont
In the present of the novel, at the end of the twentieth century, Catherine Hubbard is a fifty-two-year-old mother of three grown children. Only the oldest, Karen, lives anywhere close by. Twice-divorced and at loose ends when she learns that she and her brother Lawrence have inherited their grandparents’ house, Catherine leaves San Francisco to go back to the territory of her childhood, specifically to the old house in West Barstow, Vermont, where her grandparents lived for many years.
Catherine is unclear whether this is an escape from her old life in urban California or the...
[The entire page is 1817 words long]
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