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The Silver Screen
A Novel
by Maureen Howard


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Maureen Howard has long enchanted her readers with an urgent history of our extraordinary life and times. In The Silver Screen she conjures up the last days of silent movies in the story of Isabel Maher, who renounces the glamour of Hollywood and her talent. As Bel Murphy, wife and mother, she is confined to the drama of domestic life and plays it like a star. [Viking]

Viking Books, 244 pages
08/05/2004
$24.95

ISBN: 0670033588

Fiction
Historical Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Booklist Donna Seaman

Howard succeeds in being at once spellbinding, humorous, and intellectually stimulating as she considers the timeless mind-body conundrum in a shrewd plot rife with the bizarre, the ironic, and the tragic, and in intriguing musings on the all-but sacred texts of Ovid, St. Ignatius, Melville, and Agee. [15 May 2004, p.1580]

Kirkus Reviews

Meticulous and graceful, though some may find the allusions, dense sentences, and sometimes-opaque narrative a touch rarefied.

Library Journal Ann H. Fisher

Sad, smart, and sometimes funny. [15 June 2004, p.244]

New York Review Of Books Caroline Fraser

Dense, difficult, at times elegant, The Silver Screen can be read with admiration, giving perhaps the most pleasure as an homage to the masterpieces that inspired it.

Publishers Weekly

Readers of the series so far will also have the pleasure of discovering further connections between disparate characters in this wide, seasonal tapestry.

San Francisco Chronicle June Sawyers

A lovely meditation about the fragile bond between parents and children and about having the courage to take second chances.

The New York Times Book Review Richard Eder

Then there are the gorgeous webs of reflection and connection she weaves around her characters and their times. True, they can hamper movement, but putting aside the sweep of Howard's theme, which alone would make ''Silver Screen'' a work of desolate illumination, they add a whole store of individual discoveries.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Howard's pensive, bittersweet canon swims with Chekhov beauties stroking through Woolfian streams of memory-sensation.