You Must Remember this

From one of the great writers of our time comes this extraordinary novel of an ordinary American family in the 1950s. The Stevicks live in Port Oriskany, an industrial city in upstate New York--father, a romantic, though a dealer in secondhand furniture; mother, a 'homemaker, ' absorbed in her children and the Church; son, back from Korea, with dreams of political activism; oldest daughter, rushing into marriage early and starting a large family; middle daughter, in high school, glamorous, 'fast, ' hoping to become a pop singer; youngest daughter, quiet, watchful, secretive Enid Maria, her daddy's favorite. The façade the Stevicks present as a happy family confirms the respectable stereotype of what the decade wanted, or believed it wanted, a typical American family to be. But façades and stereotypes were strategies devised for living in an age notable for its sunny pieties and nightmare anxieties.