Previously: Every Irish novel ever.
1. A Foreboding Trip To The Old Manse
2. Exchanging Words At The Maple-Tapping Party
3. Everyone Refused To Come Downstairs
4. No One Redecorates The Violet Room
5. Children Who Speak Out Of Turn Will Have No Maple Candy At Christmas-Tide
6. Don’t Sit In That Chair, Boy; Your Mother Sat In That Chair Once And Look Where It Got Her
7. This Close Childhood Friendship Is No Longer Appropriate For Reasons We Must Never Discuss
8. Brisk Ten-Mile Walks Are The Only Medicine Or Therapy This Family Needs
9. The Cod Have Returned
10. Not Everything In Yon Churchyard Is Asleep
11. The Mills Have Closed And Taken Our Dream Of Restoring The Family Honor With Them
12. Going Outdoors: A Cure For All Social Ills
13. Graham Crackers Are Better Than Marital Relations
14. The Bluestockings Arrive For Tea
15. Barely-Audible Gossip During The Sherry Hour
16. The Salem Witch Trials Aren’t As Over As You Might Think
17. An Outsider Is Rebuffed
18. He Made His Money In Trade
19. Her Welcome, Like The Weather, Grew Chilly
20. The Friendly Baseball Game That Changed Everything
21. A Misunderstood Joke In Latin
22. Death At Boarding School
23. We Never Speak Of The Accident
24. Sleighing Is Such Fun
25. Directions Are Given In A Sinister Fashion
Tags: books, every novel ever, new england
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“12. Going Outdoors: A Cure For All Social Ills” is a lesson I learned early and well, and will LIVE MY LIFE BY.
If It Was Good Enough For Your Puritan Ancestors, It’s Good Enough For You.
Relatedly:
Having Fun Is Still Sinful, How Dare You.
Hard Work is Virtuous and Satisfying
Dying Young is a Sign of Excellent Moral Fiber
“The Cod Have Returned”
And The Rock Has Been Vanquished
Oh no, not THE COD!!!
quick, someone call The Rock!
The cod returning is a good thing.
Emotions: Let’s not have them.
The Hughly Granulated Socio-Economic Signaling of your docksiders
I live Outside of New England now, but my NE friend and I have a consistent policy that the feelings must be destroyed. The further we get from NE the more we have feelings. It is AWFUL.
It reminds me of my favorite MST3K short: A Date With Your Family, in which Crow explains to us that “emotions are for ethnic people.”
“Nothing distracts more from the charm of a conversation …..then having a personality.”
“I had a feeling today father” “Well stop it.”
“A violent argument erupts over whose day was more pleasant.”
That’s my favorite. That and Century 21 Calling
Oh god but how can you decide between that and “Hired!”
Or the existential terror that is Mr. B Natural.
SUCK IT, NEW ENGLAND, WITH YOUR COD THAT RETURN TO YOU. ::furious waving of Canada/Maritime flags::
I Met A Catholic Once And It Was Thrilling.
OMG, yes. My mother grew up in a town where the major conflict was the Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians were united by their traditional enemy, French Canadian Catholics.
In the 19th century my home town had three Congregational churches and two Episcopalian churches (and three other churches) despite having a population of around 950 people because the people with shipping money couldn’t deal with going to the same church as the people who worked in the piano factory.
There’s also a series of incredibly dry books about notable houses by the historical society (which is basically one ornery guy), including the first house to be occupied by an ITALIAN, who I’m sure everyone thought had some nerve.
3 catholic churches in my 20 minustes north of Boston town, god forbid the Italians, Irish, and Polish went to the same church.
Of course!
My grandmother grew up in Stamford, CT and her Irish best friend maintains that she’s not racist because she’s friends with my Italian grandmother.
She is, in fact, super racist and antisemitic and probably anti-Muslim. My grandfather apparently banned her from the house for about ten years for saying something antisemitic about my mother, but sadly I wasn’t born yet and couldn’t benefit from her absence.
Really, Can You Blame Us For The Unpleasantness, We Are So Very Cold And Isolated
I Have Taken To My Bed
Feh, New Yorkers!
The Cod Have Returned
Not so fast http://the-toast.net/2015/04/03/my-real-time-resp…
ISWYDT. Brilliant.
Ugh. Such. Extravagance.
This (plus yesterday’s Ethan Frome article) brings to mind a MetaFilter comment:
The Scarlet Letter helped prepare the barren soil, but New England was killed off as a setting for Romance by Ethan Frome, the single drabbest and most depressing love story in human history. For those with eyes to see the Romantic terrain, New England is a lunar crater extending from Delaware to Nova Scotia, with Ethan Frome at ground zero. (“Starkfield,” forsooth.) Such is Ethan Frome’s anti-romantic power that it extends backwards fifty years from its publication date; and forward indefinitely. No, sorry, the closest thing to gothic romance from New England is Ahab and that whale.
And then…….cometh Old Henry.
Phrasing.
Seriously- are we not doing “phrasing” anymore?
The Cod Have Returned
That one’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” isn’t it?
Cod, Elder God, the two are very similar!
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men.
But the fish-man I really fear
Is the one that’s in the mirror…
A Single Orange Is More Christmas Gift Than You Deserve
Your Inimitable Goodness Will Not Save You From God’s Wrath, Sinner
Needs more Scarlet Fever.
Scarlet Fever is No Excuse for Neglecting the Milking and the Woodpile
And more whaling.
So. Much. Whaling.
*patiently waits for that Thor on a Whaling Ship movie to be released*
https://youtu.be/f5trEfSQEVs
Tact, Like The Sun, Is Superfluous
As a Sagittarius who hates summer I certainly agree.
“Her Welcome, Like The Weather, Grew Chilly”
Pretty sure that’s the title for my autobiography.
Her Welcome, Like the Weather, Changed Every Fifteen Minutes (the Vermont version, at any rate).
All autobiographies should be titled with a zeugma.
First, every novel? I believe you mean every family/town in real life.
Second, it’s obvious to me that every New England novel needs a Flora Poste to come in and clean house.
The Boys at the Academy Learned a Lesson
A Hot Toddy is All I Require to Live
Est vita mea et accepta es ea.
How very dare you
“Death at boarding school” is my all-time favorite genre.
MINE TOO!
I recommend “Skippy Dies”. A lot. It’s Irish though.
Avoid Human Contact At All Costs
ETA: This is also the name of my self-help book #PersonalBrand
Let’s Do And Wear Things That Ralph Lauren Will Endlessly Fetishize But Never Really *Understand*
A gentle person dies an agonizing, yet edifying death.
And all those rich old families made their money in trade, didn’t they? Whether the China trade or the whale oil trade or…that OTHER trade we don’t speak of.
……..haberdashery?
Is it also New England or just England where a young man could find himself a situation at the haberdasher’s and attempt to woo the proprietor’s daughter?
For the love of G-d, Rutledge, please!
You win all the points I have to give for that 1776 reference. I bow down to you.
Where I come from (Massachusetts) most people did make their MONEY in trade, but your social standing still came from having fancy ancestors. If you had money but un-fancy ancestors you were still not cool, and if you had fancy ancestors but no money… well, see every New England novel ever written.
This Small Town Has Dark Secrets, And We Do Not Speak of Them, Especially When People Die
A repressed lesbian finds new purpose in intellectual pursuits and social justice work. The right woman for her is out there somewhere and what better way to find her?
what book is this and where can I find it?
“The Bostonians” also (kind of) “Work” by Louisa May Alcott.
(I want Olive Chancellor to be happy. So, so much.)
8. Brisk Ten-Mile Walks Are The Only Medicine Or Therapy This Family Needs
Ha-ha!
*weeps*
That is my family. I didn’t realize we were from New England, but now I know.
We also run. And swim. But the overall theme of “What anti-depressants we don’t need anti-depressants we just need to do some more miles on the ol’ elliptical and take the dog up the hill” still holds true.
Or, in the case of a friend of mine and his distressing family, “let’s just get all of the graduate degrees, preferably at once.” There’s just so much WASPy disfunction.
*These* Bluestockings can come to tea *any time*! http://www.ithacarollerderby.com/bluestockings/
Those names are amazing!
This is the derby team I need to join with my awesome hypothetical derby name: Lady Shatterknees
Let’s Play a Fun Game: It’s Called Pilgrim’s Progress
Inchoate Yearning Crosses Harvard Yard
It’s Snowing. Again.
“Inchoate Yearning Crosses Harvard Yard” would also make a good Vampire Weekend song.
There is a tag sale, and everyone is going
The virtues of flannel: a discourse
Flannel is the closest thing I have to religion
The Father Of The Bastard Child Is The Minister
These Olde-Time Puritans Are Slightly More Repressed Than We Are
He Shot His Hand Off With A Harpoon And Now His Marriage Is Unhappy
(aka my 3-greats-grandfather! good times)
also, can we have a subsection for Crime Novel Mob Bosses Who Totally Aren’t Whitey Bulger, Guys.
other literary features from my family history:
Everyone Knows Her Cousin Is The Town Drunk, But We Don’t Talk About It
and
If You Marry A Catholic, Your Kids Won’t Be Masons
Someone Falls Through The Ice On The Skating Pond
The Ship Is Lost Forever
Farming: A Noble Yet Futile Profession
At Least We Have Christmas, Christmas Is Pretty Great
The Lighthouse Is A Metaphor
“The Lighthouse is a Metaphor” also generally comes with the subheading “And Also Very Haunted.”
Having grown up in an actual museum in New England I can tell you, the lighthouse is always the most haunted place. Even people who don’t talk about/believe in ghosts will nod knowingly when the haunted-ness of the lighthouse is mentioned.
Was just coming here to post that first one!
100% accurate to my life.
There’s a decent old gentleman, still wearing his uncle’s old topcoat, whose life is as clean as his diction. Much as you wish to win his approval, you never will. You have the right name and the right suspenders but you don’t have the fine old spirit of the fine old days, though your friend, young Lowenstein, does. One day after Lowenstein has done some particularly fine work, the decent old gentleman lets his hand rest, very briefly, on young Lowenstein’s shoulder. You feel your soul scrunch up with envy.
You resolve to destroy young Lowenstein.
You begin to spread unwholesome rumors about the way in which young Lowenstein’s father got his place in the world, by off-handedly mentioning it to the parson’s wife, then swearing her to absolute secrecy.
Now you’ve made me eager to reread the Moosepath League books, set in Maine, but decidedly not like that. I haven’t yet read the final one, and I do so need to know what happens to Sundry Moss and the rest of his oh-so-eccentric friends.
The Collected Writings of Ken Cosgrove
*likes comment forever*
The Ocean Is Gray And We Are All Doomed
We Will Keep Our Family Secrets Until After The Wedding
My L.L. Bean Parka Is Older Than Yours
<3
Papa got by just fine without a television set
The old stone wall is a metaphor
I saw a Kennedy once
I too had oranges in my Christmas stocking along with walnuts. If the candy canes (perhaps one or two) were not displayed at the top of the stocking, I might not have known Santa had paid us a visit. We were poor and, I think, we knew it. Have fun with memories.
This Close Childhood Friendship Is No Longer Appropriate For Reasons We Must Never Discuss
(Not That We Need To, After All, They Didn’t Call Them “Boston Marriages” For Nothing)
This Close Childhood Friendship Is No Longer Appropriate For Reasons We Must Never Discuss
(Not That We Need To, After All, They Didn't Call Them "Boston Marriages" For Nothing)
Also, special Stephen King division: Have I Told You About This Creepy Little Town I Used To Live In? I Did? Well, Have I Written The Sequel Yet?
Also, special Stephen King division: Have I Told You About This Creepy Little Town I Used To Live In? I Did? Well, Have I Written The Sequel Yet?
The Young Man New In Town Looks Just Like His Ancestor/Nobody Talks About The Night We Drove Out The Old Wizard
The Young Man New In Town Looks Just Like His Ancestor/Nobody Talks About The Night We Drove Out The Old Wizard