Staff Pick
Robert Hill's first novel, When All is Said and Done, is an illuminating meditation on marriage: first the brilliant shock of love, soon followed by the minutiae of domestic life, the chaos of child rearing, the interference of career, the fighting, the bristling, the settling, the sense of family despite all, the eventual crisis, and the recovery — or not — from that crisis. Told in alternating chapters, first the wife and then the husband, a portrait of marriage begins to appear: both happy and unhappy.
Hill has the rare talent of articulating both the hilarity and the pathos that inevitably mark such a relationship. With Hill's amazing prose and his skill for wringing something completely new from the English language, When All Is Said and Done is a stellar debut. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Eight years and four jobs and five pregnancies and meetings and train schedules and formula and diapers and deadlines and clients and mortgage and croup and a revolving door of baby nurses and Dan stagnating in that civilian job I convinced him to take when the Air Force wanted him back for Korea of all things, they got Elvis, they didn't need Dan, a man of his age, for crying out loud, and after what they did to him in that hospital upstate . . .It is the early 1960s and Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sells ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.
Review
"From the first glorious sentence to its last astounding word, Robert Hill's When All Is Said and Done is a treasure." --TOM SPANBAUER "Hill has written a breakneck, wisecracking, tenderhearted, socially revealing portrait of an unusual early 1960s American marriage." -Booklist
About the Author
Robert Hill writes advertising copy for movies and grants for not-for-profit organizations. He lives in Portland, Oregon.