Upstate is an understated read with little in the way of plot, but the connections between the characters (a father and his two adult daughters) are lovely, melancholy and occasionally humorous. Told mostly from the father's perspective, it embodies the worries and struggles of parenthood that never disappear, no matter how old the children grow. It is a quiet, character-driven novel that perhaps could have used a bit more drive.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 5, 2018

Upstate is a family drama that focuses on a father’s sense of frustration because he feels unable to protect, or even to help, his two adult daughters, one of whom is particularly fragile. In the past, fathers passed the duty of protection to a daughter’s husband, but the fragile daughter’s boyfriend makes clear that he is not ready to accept that responsibility, nor is the paternalistic notion that women must be protected consistent with modern times. Where does that leave the father?

Alan Querry buys and develops properties in England. He gives the outward appearance of success, with a nice family home in Durham, but he’s having trouble paying his mother’s nursing home bills. He is 68 and the business to which he has devoted his life is in danger of failing.

Alan was a widower until he married Candace, who is ten years younger and not highly regarded by Alan’s two daughters. The fragile daughter, Vanessa, lives in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, where bodies unclench at the end of winter (presumably a metaphor for welcoming a new phase of life). Alan is planning to visit Vanessa because her boyfriend Josh emailed her sister Helen to say that Vanessa was depressed, withdrawing, and perhaps capable of self-harm. Alan, knowing Vanessa’s history, agrees to visit her with Helen, who visits the US regularly as a music producer for Sony, a job she is hoping to leave.

Helen believes that Vanessa is simply giving another of her “performances,” a view that is too uncharitable for Alan to hold (“I’d like to think that I don’t have a daughter who throws herself down the stairs because she damn well feels like it”). But the conflicts that face the family are deeper than Vanessa’s apparent depression, which seems to vanish when Alan and Helen arrive. For example, Alan’s uncertain finances lead to conflict with Helen, whose plans for a business start-up would benefit from Alan’s support.

Other family issues surround Vanessa’s boyfriend Josh, who strikes Alan as being overly smug, while Helen regards him as untrustworthy. Vanessa’s good spirits seem to depend on Josh’s presence, yet Vanessa is uncertain of her future with Josh, not just because of his apparent unwillingness to live with her in England, for which she increasingly longs, but because of the “smiling, weak, wary look” he gets when she tries to discuss any sort of future with him. Josh and Alan have an honest chat late in the novel that amplifies Alan’s concerns about Vanessa’s future.

Upstate offers a detailed exploration of the Querry family, their relationships and anxieties, their strengths and weaknesses. Vanessa’s intrusive Christian neighbor thinks she needs to be saved, and Vanessa is something of a mess at home, but in her classroom, lecturing on ethics in philosophy, discussing the difference (if one exists) between thinking and living, she is in complete control. At the same time, philosopher that she is, wondering whether life has any meaning beyond a continuation of existence has taken a toll on her, although she might be susceptible to having existential thoughts even if she had not pursued philosophy as a career. Happiness might just be an innate quality that some people have and other lack. That, at least, is one of the questions the novel poses.

Josh lives resolutely in the present, a trait that Vanessa philosophically admires in the abstract, but the novel asks us to question whether the self-help admonition to “live in the now” is suited to the maintenance of a relationship. Vanessa wants her father and sister to rescue her, while Helen’s judgmental (perhaps selfish) nature and her desire to live her own life conflict with her desire to help Vanessa. On top of that, Helen has her own marital difficulties.

All of that leaves Alan wondering what, if anything, he can do for his children now they are no longer living under the protection of his roof. Upstate explores the parental anxiety that comes from watching adult children make decisions and confront problems over which the parent has no control. Parents can directly affect a young child’s happiness, but adult children, no longer dependent on parents for emotional wellbeing, present less predictable parenting challenges.

In elegant prose, the novel asks the reader to imagine what options Alan might have to improve not just his children’s lives, but his own. The novel also directs an observent eye to American customs as seen from the perspective of a traditionally reserved Englishman. There is not a misplaced word in this careful study of a small family's loss of the connections that might make it easier for them to cope with their individual problems.

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This book was well written and very fun to read. The characters were great and I enjoyed the world building. The author does a great job at introducing the characters and moving the plot along. There were a few things that I didn't like, but it wasn't enough to really sway me one way or the other. It's definitely a story that I can get lost in and both feel for the characters. It is definitely a go-to novel that I highly recommend to anyone who loves a great read. Definitely a highly recommended read that I think everyone will enjoy.

Upstate was a lovely read, in an understated way. Allan is in his 60s and has two adult daughters. He and his daughter Helen travel from the UK to upstate New York to visit his other daughter Vanessa. The trip is made because Allan and Helen are worried about Vanessa, who has a tendency toward depression. Not much happens in Upstate. It’s very much a novel of musings about family, love, regret and the thoughts and feelings that are hard to say out loud. The story is mostly seen from Allan’s point of view, with occasional peeks from his daughter’s perspectives. For those of us who are parents, it does a really good job of depicting that constant low grade hum of worry that keeps us tied to our kids wherever they are. It’s mostly serious, a bit melancholy, with tinges of humour about differences between life in the UK and life in the US. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

A lucid portrait of a family. There is no big twist, murder or revelations, but a simple minimalist tale of a father and his family, there is fair share of humour in some views of the father of this tale, a nostalgic looking back and forward and some social commentary being a stranger in a new land.

Echoing works of Cheever, Tobias Wolf and Raymond Carver.

If you care for some time reading a tale with family drama told with style and simplicity, then this may satisfy you.

Upstate is a beautifully written book that will stay with you long after you have read the last page. The writing is strong and the characters are people that you become emotionally involved with. At times sad and funny it shows us both the beauty that can exist in our families but also our flaws. This definitely needs to be part of your library whether it's in e-book or physical form. Happy readng!

Interesting novel of family dynamics and struggle for mental wellness. Alan, Helen, and Vanessa have been more or less estranged from each other over the years but come together when Van suffers a more severe depression than she has in the past. How they relate to one another is well done as family secrets are dribbled out. At times the writing is a bit mannered but that befits the characters. There's a US-UK thing that really doesn't play but it wasn't too much of a concern. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Why is it so hard for some people to be happy, while others seem to achieve happiness so easily? When 68-year-old Alan, a divorced widower, is informed that his grown-up daughter Vanessa suffers from another bout of deep depression, he urgently travels from Northern England to Upstate New York, where she teaches philosophy at Skidmore College. Vanessa’s sister Helen, who works as a record executive in London, also rushes to her side. In the snowy landscapes of the area, an intimate play unfolds, circling around the question why Helen seems to have a much easier time getting her life together than Vanessa.

Wood’s narrative strategy is hidden in a lecture that Vanessa gives on the history of ethics, and in which she explains to her students (and her father, who is also in the audience):

“(…) the only serious enterprise is living. That we can’t do without. Yet to be alive properly, fully, is also to reflect on being alive, to think about life. (…) so we come full circle. Thinking about life and living life.”

That’s exactly what the two sisters represent: Helen is living life, Vanessa is thinking about it, and they both are lacking something - in fact, we’ll find out that Helen has quite a few problems as well.

Their father, Alan, also has his own worries, financially and age-related, which both of his daughters do not acknowledge. He is starting to realize that he is entering a phase in his life in which he needs more care, while his daughters still see him as a rather strong (emotional) provider. At one point, he confesses to Helen: “Sometimes I get very tired, trying to be the one member of this family who is never ‘unhappy’. (…) I have to work at it the whole time, or I’ll sink in the water.”

And there’s another aspect at play here: Wood also discusses what it means to care for a mentally ill person. While her family desperately wants to help Vanessa, it is also a very difficult situation for them. The same is true for Vanessa’s younger boyfriend, Josh, who explains: “It’s very hard to live with someone’s absolute need. I just…I don’t know if I can be responsible for her happiness.”

All of this is fascinating, and I almost gave Wood four stars. What kept me from doing that is that I felt like the story partly loses focus, is not composed consequentially enough, and has some threads that go almost nowhere (e.g. the constant comparisons between the US and England – they could stand for all kinds of things, but end up standing for nothing, IMHO).

Still, this was a very enjoyable novel, and I am looking forward to reading more fiction by Wood.

James Wood is the acclaimed English-born America-based literary critic at The New Yorker and this is his second novel. A career spent criticising other people’s books makes him vulnerable to being criticised for his own attempts at fiction but it is evident that he has learnt much about the art of novel writing. This is a well-written and well-constructed book about the plight of the parent who must watch his children grow up and suffer whilst being powerless to help them. Alan is a retired property developer who joins his daughter Helen on a trip to the US to visit his other daughter Vanessa who is apparently in some sort of mental turmoil. Each daughter needs different things from him. One needs material help which he’s reluctant to give and one needs more spiritual help which he’s incompetent to give. As an examination of being a parent to adult children, I found the book reasonably compelling and certainly well-observed. The characterisation is, on the whole, empathetic and convincing, and overall I enjoyed the book. But it wasn’t one that absorbed me at all and in many ways it felt quite an ordinary read. Perhaps I expected more, given Wood’s reputation. Nevertheless it’s a quietly enjoyable novel and well worth the time spent with it.

Did not read. Removing from shelf. Did not read. Removing from shelf. Did not read. Removing from shelf. Did not read. Removing from shelf.

Alan Querry, who lives in northern England, decides to accompany his daughter, Helen, to visit his other daughter, Vanessa who lives in Saratoga Springs, NY. Vanessa teaches philosophy at Skidmore College. Though Vanessa has been in NY for some years, he has never visited.

The novel is a portrait of a man trying to come to terms with how his daughters turned out in life. Dealing with the lives our adult children have chosen and how life treats them is a dilemma many of us grapple with in our later years. We hope for our children's success, but even more critical their happiness. That aspect of life is entirely out of our hands. I think that if we stay physically close to our grown children, it helps. In the end, as a wise James Woods lays out for us, we can't make them happy as we did when they were babies. Perhaps, how we handle the process of growing up is the key to the mystery.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Alan Querry lives a modest life in Northumberland, he is moderately successful as a developer and after the hard time of the divorce and death of his first wife, he found a new love. When his daughter Helen informs him that her sister Vanessa obviously has another depressive episode, Alan makes his way from England to Saratoga Springs upstate New York where Vanessa lives with her boyfriend Josh and where she teaches philosophy. Alan has never visited her, too many things kept him from crossing the ocean. Helen joins him and thus, the family is united in a wintry small town and faced with the uncomfortable truths they have avoided for years.

James Wood is best known for being a literary critic for The Guardian and The New Yorker Magazine and teaching literature at Harvard. “Upstate” is his latest novel which focusses on philosophical dilemmas and the bonds of a family.

Clearly, the incident that triggers the family reunion was Vanessa’s accident during which she broke her arm. Yet, this was only the sad climax of a depressive period – something she has known all her life. How come that her younger sister Helen, who had to go through the same hardships as a child and is also struggling with her career, does not know these moody periods and can embrace happiness much easier? Why are some people just stronger, more resilient than others?

It has never been easy for the family members to openly talk about their feelings. Thus, they need to find other topics to layer what they want to say and to make it expressible. For Helen it is music, for Vanessa it has always been philosophy and for Alan, nature seems to be the clue. At the end, the wintry ice is melting, after it was a cause for a minor road accident of Alan, that also the ice between father and daughter finally melts and gives way for a new spring, a new beginning.

What I enjoyed about the novel is the gentle pace at which it moves and the tenderness with which Wood talks about his characters. The impressive American landscape contrasts with the critical look at the people and especially American politics – we are around 2007 immediately before Obama announced his candidacy. Where nature is a lot more extreme, everything created by man is poorer there than the European counterpart, which more conservative but also more reliable. Such as the people – in the end, the family bonds are stronger and more dependable than the love bonds.

This book ended up in a very different place than it started for me. Initially, there were long, intricate descriptions of England and The English countryside that felt a bit high-handed and pompous. But, as the story moved to the US (specifically to Saratoga Springs, NY — the upstate of the title), the characters took over the story. They were not pompous, but, nor were they particularly deep.

I read about 10% of this and then just didn't have any motivation to pick it up again The writing style just did nothing for me.

Two sentences in this book describe one of its themes, the difficulty for a parent to come to terms with adult children: "Though you child was only briefly a child, you never quite got used to seeing her no longer one...." and "...you both look like grown-up women to me, you do grown-up things, so why you should act like teenagers is a mystery." Alan Querry finds himself in Saratoga Springs where his younger daughter, Vanessa, is a professor of philosophy, and for the first few days, his other daughter, Helen, a successful Sony executive, joins them. And that's just one of the themes of this wonderful book.

That Wood has set this book in 2008 during the Bush administration is no accident, and it was while reading this that I was hit by the fact that the ensuing ten years has wrought massive changes, and 2008 is gone with the wind. We have subsequently experienced the entire Obama era, which is spoken of in hopeful terms since he is still the Illinois Junior Senator. That is the undercurrent that rang most sharply for me. These characters were still staring down the events of their time. In addition, the changes between the US and UK have never been dealt with so beautifully from this point of view. (Usually it's a Yank in Merrie Olde England, not the other way around.)

Alan has not spent much time in the United States, and early on, his comparisons and observations are far from complimentary. The noise. The sheer overblown size of everything. Even the train's obtrusive whistle (not realizing it is required to be sounded before every crossing, and not just for fun). The circus that he observes America to be. Also, his life which has been made comfortable by his estate business in Northumberland has been experiencing ominous rumblings of what is to come in 2009. Further, Helen makes a prescient observation about the business of the music business, drawing an analogy between music flowing through open taps instead of being purchased in expensive little Evian bottles, foreseeing the streaming services we now take for granted. In addition, thanks to Vanessa, there is some philosophical rumination, which I must admit I dashed through since it didn't further the plot. The ending, more like that of a short story than a full length novel, left many questions unanswered, leaving room for, I hope, more of the same in a sequel.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

Alan and his younger daughter Helen travel to Saratoga Springs to visit elder daughter Vanessa, after Josh, Vanessa's partner, emails his concern about her mental health. It emerges that Vanessa has had periods of depression in the past and has never found happiness to be a natural state of mind. Helen and Alan (despite marital and career difficulties on her part and financial difficulties on his) find life easier to navigate.

I enjoyed this beautifully written novel very much. It was gentle and sad and featured believable flawed but well-meaning characters. The blurb describes its themes as philosophical, but they were also personal; about the way the members of a family are bound to and responsible for one another. The "Englishman abroad" reflections on America and the American way of life (this is set as Obama is announcing his candidacy for president) were amusing.

Highly recommended.