"Mermaids are just the most whimsical, mystical creatures of all time," Jennings told Cosmopolitan magazine.
But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s.
Our reviewer, Jay McInerney, said Greenfeld's "keen observational skills make his characters... instantly recognizable as creatures of their time and place without quite denying them their humanity".
"We may be creatures of our time and place," she has said, "but we make choices, not always for the best, when we love and work".
In the end they were less a contemporary family than creatures of their time, propelled into the modern world while still carrying a load of Victorian baggage.
"Creatures of their time" they may have been, but they were not aristocrats, not all of them were fearful of excessive democracy and some of them did believe that poor men should have the vote.
DOMESTIC LIFE about taking care of aging parents... Writer tells about his parents--now in their eighties--visiting him from California... They're creatures of another time, when the middle class had money.
Yet it is a cultural… DOMESTIC LIFE about taking care of aging parents... Writer tells about his parents--now in their eighties--visiting him from California... They're creatures of another time, when….
Characters who might seem distractingly bigger than life have been shrunk to average proportions, so we can identify with them more fully as creatures of our time and place.
Yet when he's showing rather than telling, his sensitivity to nuances of the zeitgeist and his keen observational skills make his characters (some of whom will seem eerily familiar to longtime residents of downtown Manhattan) instantly recognizable as creatures of their time and place without quite denying them their humanity.
By James Atlas The New Yorker, October 13 , 1997P. 54 DOMESTIC LIFE about taking care of aging parents... Writer tells about his parents--now in their eighties--visiting him from California... They're creatures of another time, when the middle class had money..
