Mrs. Murray

To Mattie Murray, the little house on Opal Street is the ne plus ultra of ambition, hard-won after poverty and homelessness, and she tells those stories of scraping and striving as if they were a latter-day Iliad. Her daughter Angela hears only a life to avoid, and the widening gap between the older generation's satisfied ambition and the younger's restless despair runs straight through the Murray parlor. Mattie's choices quietly set the terms of the novel's central question: what passing costs, and who pays it.