Baldur's Gate

This is Eleanor Clark's major novel—a book representing years of work and embodying the images of a lifetimes. It is her first work since her National Book Award winner, The Oysters of Locmariaquer. It is set in Jordan, a Connecticut village, during the nineteen-fifties. Eva, around whose life the story unfolds, is a young woman who stands at the center of the town and the time—her roots in the substantial and elegant past, which since the war has faded into remote history; her present one of turbulence and change; her future a mystery and a challenge, opening out into possibilities that her New England ancestors, her parents even, could not have conceived of. Eva is seen in her loves, in her motherhood, in her relation to the powerful figures of her childhood—Miss Pryden, who dominated Jordan with her aristocratic mind and style until her death; the sculptor Baldur Blake, who in a burst of renewed creative energy envisions a new and modern Jordan; her own defeated father and destroyed mother; and in relation to the new people of the town—the men of business who do not know or care about the past; the immigrant families who stand outside tradition; the children of postwar. As she struggles to comprehend the flux of life that surrounds her, to define herself against the real world of her time, Eva becomes for us a powerful and meaningful expression of our own past and present, and of America's.