Richard Stern (1928–2013)

«A su feliz pequeña escala, Las hijas de otros hombres fue a la década de los sesenta lo que El gran Gatsby a los años veinte o Las uvas de la ira a los treinta. Hay mucho que admirar en ella: la precisión, el tacto, la humanidad del sentimiento, su tremendo encanto... Es como si Chéjov hubiese escrito Lolita».
Philip Roth

«Hasta el día en que el señor Merriwether se marchó de casa —un mes después de su divorcio—, los Merriwether parecían una familia serena e ideal». Estamos en verano, a finales de la década de 1960. Las calles de Cambridge, Massachusetts, están llenas de hippies de pelo largo y coloridas prendas, pero el doctor Robert Merriwether, que enseña en Harvard y lleva mucho tiempo casado, no repara lo más mínimo en toda esa vida bullendo a su alrededor. Cultivado, reflexivo, animal de costumbres... Merriwether es todo menos un hombre impulsivo. Por eso es tan extraño, tan deslumbrante e inesperado, que mientras su esposa Sarah está de vacaciones conozca a Cynthia Ryder, y que en poco tiempo profesor y alumna empiecen un intenso romance.… (altro)

"Miss Ryder was golden-haired but almost Indian dark, slimly full, tall, slightly prognathous, brown-eyed. Her hair waterfalled to the top thoracic vertebra, her tanned flesh issued from a laundered yellow corolla. A human sunflower." - Richard Stern, Other Men's Daughters

Other Men’s Daughters - American author Richard Stern’s 1973 novel of forty-year-old family man and Harvard professor Robert Merriweather’s transformation brought about by his relationship with a twenty-year-old beauty by the name of Cynthia Ryder. For instance, here's the author’s description of Merriweather’s wife catching a whiff of the change: “For months now, Sarah specialized in her husband’s moves. She classified his gestures, checked his bills, noted his new suit, his brighter ties, the extra shag in his hair. He spent more time in the lab than he had for fifteen years. There is a new ease in his speech and dress, yet he has long since stopped asking her what she had even longer refused him.”

In a way, this is a timeless tale of modern life: older university professor stuck in a stale marriage discovers new dimensions of love and intimacy with bright, vivacious younger woman. Robert Merriweather shares a good deal in common with another professor from a much beloved classic: William Stoner in John Williams’ Stoner, a novel set at the University of Missouri in the early 1930s. And, of course, the respective dramas of William Stoner and Robert Merriweather have been repeated scores of times across college campuses ever since.

In yet another sense Richard Stern’s novel captures the unique social and cultural shift that occurred in the United States in the 1960s. So much so, Philip Roth notes in his Introduction to this New York Review Books edition: “Other Men’s Daughters illuminates a decisive turning point in American mores. The novel reminds us of where we were, morally speaking, when the vast assault upon convention, propriety, and entrenched belief began to challenge authority, high and low, and of the wreckage that caused, the theatrics it fostered, the hope and euphoria and intemperance it quickened.”

In Saul Bellow’s Herzog, the entire novel is told wholly from main character Herzog’s point of view - his memories, his thoughts, his perceptions, the letters he writes; a novel that’s a hair’s breath away from Herzog relating the story himself in the first-person. Very different from Richard Stern’s third person narrator, where unfolding events are reported a great deal more objectively and occasionally shift from Robert Merriweather to focus on the reflections and feelings of others: Cynthia Ryder, Merriweather’s wife Sarah, a former Harvard colleague, Cynthia’s father who happens to be a wealthy lawyer from North Carolina. All with great precision and economy.

To share a small sample, here is Sarah, irate and furious, fuming over her role as Robert’s short, chubby, unattractive, stay-at-home wife: “He would be off, the secret prowler. While she kept the home fires burning. And he blamed her. As if her body could be purchased by three daily meals, and this leaky hutch which she alone kept up. (He couldn’t hammer a nail.) As if he really cared to make love to her. Frigid? No, no more than any woman with a husband who saw her as an interior broom.” Is it any wonder literary critic Anatole Broyard reviewing the novel for the New York Times said Sarah loves her hatred with a sexual intensity?

And in case anybody is wondering about Cynthia Ryder being the young innocent seduced by a smooth talking older man, here is the North Carolina lovely on her teenage love life prior to meeting Merriweather: “Boys were there to be used, to be loved, to be lost in, to be surmounted. Virginity was the first obstacle. Between that and marriage was the Era of Exploration: boys-men were to be explored, tested. For Cynthia, the spring of Sixty-Nine had been a sexual pageant. Behind Jamie’s back (her steady boyfriend at the time), she’d slept at least once with eight boys.”

As readers we share the various (and somewhat predictable) scenes of Robert Merriweather going through the travails of his divorce – the showdown with Sarah, the distasteful meeting with Sarah’s lawyer, picking over the details of the divorce settlement, the last family Thanksgiving and Christmas with Sarah and their two sons and two daughters in the New England house that has been in Merriweather’s family for generations. Richard Stern's writing brings out the touching humanness without sliding into emotions overly sentimental or cloying.

Such a penetrating, well-written novel, thus I will conclude with a quote from one of America’s foremost literary masters, Thomas Berger: “For years I have admired the elegant fiction of Richard Stern for its impeccable language, its gracious erudition, and, above all, it’s brilliant wit. In Other Men’s Daughters, to me his most moving novel, these qualities serve the cause of mercy.”


American author Richard Stern (1928-2013)… (altro)