Idle Curiosity

by Martha Bergland

Ed Check--former farmer and ex-husband of two very different women--finds that despite their status as grown-ups, his daughters need him now more than ever. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555972578
• ISBN13: 9781555972578
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 170 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Moving, quiet sequel to FARM UNDER A LAKE.

Bergland's first novel, FARM UNDER A LAKE, is a book I have often recommended (and given) to friends ever since I first read it. I have long awaited her second book--and here it is. It is effectively a sequel to FARM, but the writing style is more thoughtful and philosophical, befitting the now-older main character. A worthy followup to an outstanding first book, with wisdom and insights that will stick with you. Highly recommended.

A brief, elegant, morally sophisticated novel.

"What kind of a fool confuses curiosity and desire, and then thinks desire and love are the same thing?" Ed Check asks himself near the end of Martha Bergland's brief, elegant second novel, "Idle Curiosity." No fool, after all, and not so idle either, Ed is an ex-farmer and two times ex-husband who finds himself spending his old age in a residential hotel owned by his first ex-wife, Edith Flaherty, in Half Moon, Illinois. Bergland introduces Ed as a "tiny old man in a red-and-white stirped bathrobe" whose toes in black socks and no shoes "curled and uncurled over the crumbling curb" while he waited for someone--anyone--to come by and help him with a stuck zipper. Ed might be quaint and his life stagnant, but he possesses two things that make this novel hum: daughters and a luminous sense of place. Illinois land and air are vivid personalities in the novel: "The air that morning was sweet with the scent of all the rich land it had drifted across. . . . This air, he knew, had passed not long before over his far, over what had been his farm." Though Ed longs for the farm that was sold out from under him twenty years ago, "Idle Curiosity" is not a nostalgic story about family agriculture, and the plot reveals that the loss of the farm had as much to do with the conflicting desires of men and women as it did with the economy. Ed has a heart condition--literally and figuratively--that causes him to move in and out of reveries that reveal his deep longings for his second wife, the alcoholic Marlene--"the meat of him, his heart and muscle . . . all that was left of him was wanting her"--and for the safety and happiness of his daughters: "He had seen somewhere pictures of Indian pueblos--houses--carved under and sheltered by the overhang of cliffs. That's where his love for his daughters resided--under the overhang of his ribs." This might sound sentimental, but it's not. Much of the credit for that goes to Bergland's other lead characters: Ed's two younger girls--fortyish Janet Hawn and nineteen-year-old Vickie Check. Readers of Bergland's first novel, "A Farm Under a Lake," will recognize Janet as its narrator. In fact, "Idle Curiosity" takes up approximately when--and where--Farm came to rest, on the morning Janet arrives in Half Moon after driving her private duty nursing patient south from Wisconsin. Now Janet and almost everyone else in Half Moon will spend the summer waiting for her husband, Jack, to show up. Janet feed her dad's curiosity, especially when he realizes that Nelson Alvin, the new optometrist in town, "pays Janet a kind of attention that Jack never could or did." This love triangle--like the one of Jack, Janet, and Jack's brother Carl in "Farm"--threatens not just one marriage but Half Moon's whole comically ingrown society. Yet Ed is refreshingly unprejudiced: " He didn't even know what to wish for Janet. Should he wish for her a marriage that made sense in so many ways and at least gave her a kind of stability