Dew, Robb Forman 1946–

(Robb Reavill Forman Dew)

PERSONAL: Born October 26, 1946, in Mt. Vernon, OH; daughter of Oliver Duane (a neurosurgeon) and Helen (Ransom) Forman; married Charles Burgess Dew (a professor of history), January 26, 1968; children: Charles Stephen, John Forman. Education: Attended Louisiana State University.

ADDRESSES: Home—Williamstown, MA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Little, Brown and Company, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

CAREER: Writer. Teacher at Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, spring, 1984.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Book Award for first novel, 1982, for Dale Loves Sophie to Death.

WRITINGS:

Dale Loves Sophie to Death (novel), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1981.

The Time of Her Life (novel), Morrow (New York, NY) 1984.

A Southern Thanksgiving: Recipes and Musings for a Manageable Feast, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1992.

Fortunate Lives, Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1994.

The Evidence against Her (novel), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2004.

The Truth of the Matter, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor of stories to periodicals, including Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly, and New Yorker.

SIDELIGHTS: In Robb Forman Dew's first two novels, the National Book Award-winning Dale Loves Sophie to Death and The Time of Her Life, the contemporary family is of central importance. According to Dew in a Publishers Weekly interview conducted by Sybil Steinberg, the environment she encountered as a child was an unhappy one: "What I understood with the deepest part of my compassion and with an abiding sense of irony was the unconscious harm people can do to each other, with the best of intentions." In her writing, Dew gets at this unconscious harm, and also at the sometimes insurmountable, inexplicable pleasures and love associated with family life. Overall, critics feel she does this well, as evidenced by Lisa Schwarzbaum's comment in the Detroit News: "In The Time of Her Life, Dew … puts her sensitive ear to a family's heart. And … she comes up with a beautiful, personal language with which to describe its pulse."

Dew's first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, is characterized by reviewers as a quiet, domestic, mildly passionate piece of literature. Katha Pollitt remarked in the New York Times Book Review that for the most part, this novel is "a mosaic of small events and inner reflections," because its principal action takes place in the minds of Dinah and Martin Howells. At the outset, Dinah and the three Howells children return to Dinah's hometown of Enfield, Ohio, for the summer, a routine they have undertaken for the past eight years. As usual, Martin stays behind in the Berkshires to teach and edit a literary journal. Although the separation is an increasingly difficult one for this couple, Dinah's dependency on this annual ritual suggests that she has not come to terms with her past. Indeed, Ms. contributor Joan Silber viewed this perennial undertaking as Dinah's plea for an apology from her parents and her brother for neglecting her when she was growing up. In turn, Washington Post Book World's Robert Wilson interpreted the action as Dinah's attempt to extend her own adolescence. Although, as in summers past, Dinah engages in the same summertime activities at the same summertime pace, this summer, at age thirty-six, she is fraught with heightened sensitivities. Only when her middle child becomes sick do certain realities of life become solidified for her, thereby allowing her to reckon with her past. According to Wilson, "what Dinah realizes, simply and awfully, is that she is grown up, 'and because she was grown up she had … to contend with a terrible fate—she had mortal children, and she had to recognize it and deal with it every moment of her days.'" During these same months Martin, after experiencing a displeasing extramarital affair and other circumstances, makes his own personal discoveries, and when husband and wife are reunited at summer's end, they come together with a greater appreciation of the enduring nature of marital and familial love.

Wilson found Dale Loves Sophie to Death to be the type of novel that grows richer with each reading: "Dew's gift is to transform the ordinary, to charge it with interest," and yet, he explains, Dew is never sentimental about children nor about family life in general. To Wilson, Dew has taken a difficult subject for a novel, "because familial love is not as vivid as first love or adulterous love or homosexual love …, [and] has shaped a novel that profoundly satisfies both the mind and the heart." Similarly, Pollitt gave Dew credit for having the "courage to write the traditional novel of domestic feeling today, the novel with no violence, no million-dollar deals, no weird sex…. The rewards of Dale Loves Sophie to Death are quiet but rich, and prove once again that in fiction there are no automatically compelling subjects. There are only compelling writers."

In contrast to Dale Loves Sophie to Death, in which Dew affirms the goodness of family life, The Time of Her Life is Dew's testament to the family unit as a potential perpetrator of "unconscious harm." According to Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World, The Time of Her Life examines "the fragility of [family] ties, the ease with which they can be broken, the carelessness of what passes for 'love,' and the terrible, lasting damage that can result…. It is a dark novel…. There's no artificial uplift in The Time of Her Life…. Dew offers what life itself offers: no easy way out."

As Yardley noted, the central character in The Time of Her Life is a family. This family, a threesome, consists of Claudia, the well-educated yet unambitious, indecisive wife; Avery, the boyish, cheerful husband who hides behind his countenance and his drinking because he has not achieved his dreams; and, finally, Jane, the eleven-year-old daughter of "pre-adolescent sweetness and stubbornness, intelligence and mood," wrote Schwarzbaum. In the space of this novel, Avery moves out on Claudia (not for the first time) and eventually has an affair with Jane's violin teacher; in due time, Claudia slips into a state of dormancy. After a lengthy separation, the couple reconciles, but even this is inconclusive and takes place after Jane has suffered terribly from the actions and inactions of her insensitive parents.

According to reviewers, Dew's capacities as a writer are well at work in The Time of Her Life. In a New York Times assessment, Michiko Kakutani pointed out Dew's ability to "convey, with a skill matched by few writers today, the quick, peculiar shifts in feelings that we experience, moment to moment, day to day—how, in an instant, love can sour into irritation; anxiety dissolve into affection; attraction subside into nostalgia…. In The Time of Her Life, [Dew] uses this ability to map out the ambiguities of the Parks' marriage, and to show the devastating consequences that this unstable alliance has on their daughter…. Jane is treated by her parents as a miniature adult. Claudia confides to Jane her fears that Avery is a closet homosexual. Avery uses Jane as a go-between in his affair with her violin teacher…. As readers we watch with growing trepidation as [Jane] gradually becomes infected with the violence of her parents' emotions." Yardley likewise described Jane as the chief victim in this work: "It is a heartbreaking descent…. Nothing is spared us: none of the terrible things Avery and Claudia say, to each other and to Jane…. It is not easy to read The Time of Her Life, because it cuts so close to the bone that the reader feels the blade…. Everything about this novel is right: the characters …, the interplay of plot and theme, the wonderful prose, and the depiction of the world of children—a world Dew seems to know better, and to convey with greater understanding, than any American writer since Carson McCullers. The Time of Her Life is the work of that rarest of people, a real writer, and it will knock your socks off."

In Dew's 2001 novel, The Evidence against Her, she sets her characters in the past—in this case, a small Ohio town in 1888. The novel chronicles the lives of three children born there on one day: Lily, privileged daughter of the Scofield clan, which owns the town foundry; her cousin Warren; and Robert, their neighbor. The trio are a tight-knit group of playmates as children, bossed about by the spirited Lily. As adults, Lily and Robert marry, while the town wonders if Warren was secretly devastated by the pairing. But Warren's marriage to Agnes, ten years their junior, shifts the focus in The Evidence against Her to this new character. Agnes recounts an abusive childhood in a dysfunctional family as she becomes determined to give her children the pleasant upbringing she was denied. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, felt that the novel's "time frame … robs Ms. Dew of her eye for contemporary social detail and her intuitive sense of how people struggle today to find a balance between tradition and modernity in their day-to-day lives." Kakutani continued by noting: "As a result this book fails to play to the author's strengths." Other reviews were more positive. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called The Evidence against Her "a leisurely, deceptively formal, quietly ambitious exploration of love." A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote, "A marvel of lyrical understatement, the narrative flows like a river—smooth, with surprising depths, some turbulence and the inexorability of time's passing." Booklist writer Carol Haggas compared Dew to some notable American novelists of a prior generation—Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, and Eudora Welty. "With an unfailing eye for detail and an intense concentration on the intricacies of ordinary lives, Dew flawlessly reconstructs a bygone era of privilege and passion," Haggas wrote.

Dew wrote of her own family crises in her 1994 book, The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out. She recounts their college-age son's revelation that he was a homosexual, and how shocked she and her husband were despite their imagined progressiveness. Dew even confesses that they considered moving away from their hometown. Eventually, they come to terms with their son's sexuality, find a support group for parents, and even become advocates. Dew writes frankly of the cold shoulders that a few of their friends and acquaintances turned, and how this helped she and her husband understand discrimination from an entirely new standpoint. Anne R. Houdek, writing in the Lambda Book Report, described it as "a painfully detailed account" that "should be of help to many parents who are equally unprepared." A Publishers Weekly reviewer found it "affecting and eloquent" and noted that Dew's previous "fiction charts with compassion and nuance the durability of the American family. Dew's memoir complements these qualities."

The Scofields figure again in The Truth of the Matter, the second in a planned trilogy, reintroducing Agnes Scofield, now a widow who has raised four children on a schoolteacher's salary. In 1947, after their respective contributions to the war effort, Agnes's children return to the homestead, with lives and families of their own. Agnes must reconcile the role she has created for herself in their absence with that of what her children demand from her now, namely that she fulfill the role of being a mother to them forevermore. Though Agnes has moved on from the traditions of selflessness and submission of her own needs to those of her children, the children do not necessarily believe it is proper for her to do so. Like Dew's other novels, The Truth of the Matter focuses on life's quiet moments of truth as Agnes carries on a half-hearted romance with an old friend and journeys back to Maine to make new discoveries about her childhood and about her husband, who died in a car crash in 1930. As with the first book in the trilogy, The Evidence against Her, critics appreciated Dew's ear for that which is ordinary in life. "Dew details inner turmoil with delicacy, wit and precision," wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, and Jennifer Reese, writing in Entertainment Weekly, appreciated the "ambivalence" and "dignity" with which Agnes faces her situation.

Dew once told CA: "I grew up as a Southerner and I believe that background is the source of my interest in the intricacies of family life. My grandfather, with whom I lived for a portion of my adolescence, was the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom, and his voice has certainly shaped my style."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 1994, Whitney Scott, review of The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out, p. 1649; July, 2001, Carol Haggas, review of The Evidence against Her, p. 1949; August, 2002, Mary McCay, review of The Evidence against Her, p. 1984.

Detroit News, September 23, 1984, Lisa Schwartzbaum, review of The Time of Her Life.

Entertainment Weekly, November 18, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of The Truth of the Matter, p. 140.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2001, review of The Evidence against Her, p. 1048; September 1, 2005, review of The Truth of the Matter, p. 933.

Lambda Book Report, July-August, 1994, Anne R. Houdek, review of The Family Heart, p. 29;

Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1984, Judith Moore, review of The Time of Her Life, p. 16.

Ms., July, 1981, Joan Silber, review of Dale Loves Sophie to Death, p. 25.

New Republic, April 4, 1981, Ann Tyler, review of Dale Loves Sophie to Death, p. 35.

Newsweek, May 4, 1981, Jean Strouse, review of Dale Loves Sophie to Death, p. 81.

New York Times, September 4, 1984, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Time of Her Life, p. C18; November 9, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "Family Life, without the Meditations," p. E40.

New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1981, Katha Pollitt, review of Dale Loves Sophie to Death, p. 14; October 7, 1984, Caroline Seebohm, review of The Time of Her Life, p. 14; October 14, 2001, Brigitte Frase, "Strange Fits of Passion," p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, July 13, 1984, review of The Time of Her Life, p. 44; September 7, 1984, Sybil Steinberg, interview with Dew, p. 80; December 20, 1991, review of Fortunate Lives, p. 66; October 26, 1992, review of A Southern Thanksgiving, p. 65; April 18, 1994, review of The Family Heart, p. 51; July 30, 2001, review of The Evidence against Her, p. 59; September 5, 2005, review of The Truth of the Matter, p. 35.

Washington Post, September 16, 2001, Bart Schneider, "Triple Helix," p. T3.

Washington Post Book World, June 7, 1981, Robert Wilson, review of Dale Loves Sophie to Death; August 26, 1984, Jonathan Yardley, review of The Time of Her Life.