Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

Table of Contents

Praise for Stern Men

Rich as drawn butter and as comical as the crawly crustacean itself... Gilbert has penned a Dickensian tale; one wishes it ran in two volumes.USA Today

Beautifully wrought and very funny... Gilberts tangy language has as much music as muscle; the novel is Emersonian in its clarity and Austenian in its sly social observations.

While Elizabeth Gilbert is not the first writer to suggest that smart women have much to teach stern men, she puts the idea forward with rugged power.

This funny, clever, and wise novel, filled with well-developed characters who are more than eccentric stereotypes, moves [Gilbert] squarely to the forefront of writers to watch.

A wonderful novel that will have you laughing out loud, Stern Men is an admirable debut from a writer obviously destined for literary longevity. Like Tyler and Irving (and Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, and Alice Hoffman) Gilbert has a gift for comic fiction that conveys serious issues. And like those writers, Gilbert will most certainly be around for a long time to come.The Denver Post

Gilberts storytelling brio and keen intelligence prove irresistible. New York Newsday

PENGUIN BOOKS

STERN MEN

Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of a short story collection, Pilgrims (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award), The Last American Man (a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), and, most recently, the #1 New York Times bestseller Eat, Pray, Love: One Womans Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. For five years she worked as a journalist at GQ, where her feature writing earned her three National Magazine Award nominations. She lives in New Jersey.

To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit our Web sites at www.penguin.com or www.vpbookclub.com.

Books BY ELIZABETH GILBERT

Pilgrims
Stern Men
The Last American Man

Eat, Pray, Love: One Womans Search
for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

To Sarah Chalfant.
For everything.

In an aquarium at Woods Hole in the summer of 1892, a conch was placed in the same tank with a female lobster, which was nearly ten inches long, and which had been in captivity about eight weeks. The conch, which was of average size, was not molested for several days, but at last, when hard pressed by hunger, the lobster attacked it, broke off its shell, piece by piece, and made quick work of the soft parts.

The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D., 1895

Prologue

TWENTY MILES out from the coast of Maine, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island face offtwo old bastards in a staring contest, each convinced he is the others only guard. Nothing else is near them. They are among nobody. Rocky and potato-shaped, they form an archipelago of two. Finding these twin islands on a map is a most unexpected discovery; like finding twin towns on a prairie, twin encampments on a desert, twin huts on a tundra. So isolated from the rest of the world, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are separated from each other by only a fast gut of seawater, known as Worthy Channel. Worthy Channel, nearly a mile wide, is so shallow in parts at low tide that unless you knew what you were doingunless you really knew what you were doingyou might hesitate to cross it even in a canoe.

In their specific geography, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are so astonishingly similar that their creator must have been either a great simpleton or a great comic. They are almost exact duplicates. The islandsthe last peaks of the same ancient, sunken mountain chainare made from the same belt of quality black granite, obscured by the same cape of lush spruce. Each island is approximately four miles long and two miles wide. Each has a handful of small coves, a number of freshwater ponds, a scattering of rocky beaches, a single sandy beach, a single great hill, and a single deep harbor, held possessively behind its back, like a hidden sack of cash.

On each island, there is a church and a schoolhouse. Down by the harbor is a main street (called, on each island, Main Street), with a tiny cluster of public buildingspost office, grocer, tavern. There are no paved roads to be found on either island. The houses on the islands are much alike, and the boats in the harbors are identical. The islands share the same pocket of interesting weather, significantly warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than any coastal town, and they often find themselves trapped within the same spooky bank of fog. The same species of fern, orchid, mushroom, and wild rose can be found on both islands. And, finally, these islands are populated by the same breeds of birds, frogs, deer, rats, foxes, snakes, and men.

The Penobscot Indians left the first human records on Fort Niles and Courne Haven. They found the islands an excellent source of sea fowl eggs, and the ancient stone weapons of these early visitors still show up in certain coves. The Penobscot didnt long remain so far out in the middle of the sea, but they did use the islands as temporary fishing stations, a practice picked up handily in the early seventeenth century by the French.

The first permanent settlers of Fort Niles and Courne Haven were two Dutch brothers, Andreas and Walter Van Heuvel, who, after taking their wives and children and livestock out to the islands in June of 1702, laid claim to one island for each family. They called their settlements Bethel and Canaan. The foundation of Walter Van Heuvels home remains, a moss-covered pile of rock in a meadow on what he called Canaan Islandthe exact site, in fact, of Walters murder at the hands of his brother just one year into their stay. Andreas also killed Walters children on that day and took his brothers wife over to Bethel Island to live with his family. Andreas was frustrated, it is said, that his own wife was not bearing him children fast enough. Eager for more heirs, hed set out to claim the only other woman around. Andreas Van Heuvel broke his leg some months later, while building a barn, and he died from an ensuing infection. The women and children were soon rescued by a passing English patrol ship and taken to the stockade at Fort Pemaquid. Both women were pregnant at the time. One delivered a healthy son, whom she named Niles. The other womans child died in delivery, but the mothers life was saved by Thaddeus Courne, an English doctor. Somehow this event gave rise to the names of the two islands: Fort Niles and Courne Haventwo very pretty places that would not be settled again for another fifty years.

The Scots-Irish came next, and they stayed. One Archibald Boyd, along with his wife, his sisters, and their husbands, took over Courne Haven in 1758. They were joined during the next decade by the Cobbs, Pommeroys, and Strachans. Duncan Wishnell and his family started a sheep farm on Fort Niles in 1761, and Wishnell soon found himself surrounded by neighbors called Dalgleish, Thomas, Addams, Lyford, Cardoway, and ODonnell, as well as some Cobbs whod moved over from Fort Niles. The young ladies of one island married the young men of the other, and the family names began floating back and forth between the two places like loose buoys. By the mid-1800s, new names appeared, from new arrivals: Friend, Cashion, Yale, and Cordin.