Leslie Brown
Hamilton’s new book is set on a family farm.
You might be familiar with some of Jane Hamilton’s work, even if you haven’t read any of her novels or seen the movies based on them.
That’s because the famous author and her husband sell products from their apple orchard at the Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Capitol Square. “Madison really feels like my second home,” she says.
Hamilton will launch her new book, The Excellent Lombards, with friends Dean Robbins, Kevin Henkes and Laura Dronzek at A Room of One’s Own bookstore at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 19.
“We all happen to have new books out this spring,” says Robbins, the former editor of Isthmus. Painter/illustrator Dronzek and Henkes, the Caldecott-winning children’s author, have collaborated on When Spring Comes. Robbins’ new work is also a children’s book, Two Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass.
“We are four fine friends, and it’s going to be a wild, bacchanalian book affair, if that isn’t an oxymoron,” says Hamilton, laughing. “We’re going to do a little show all together, and then there will be a Q and A, and whatever frivolity happens after that.”
Although Hamilton is a native of Oak Park, Ill., she has strong ties to Wisconsin. She spent childhood summers at a “farm camp” near Delavan, and her grandmother had a farmhouse in Twin Lakes, near Lake Geneva. She and her husband, Madison native Bob Willard, live on their orchard in Racine County.
“I’ve lived in Wisconsin for my whole adult life, which on the whole seems a stroke of great good fortune,” she says.
Hamilton’s first and second novels, The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, were both Oprah’s Book Club selections. Hamilton adapted A Map of the World into a film, released in 2000, starring Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore.
The Excellent Lombards is about a girl named Mary Frances Lombard, who Hamilton says is “deranged by love — the love of her family.”
“She wants never to grow up,” says Hamilton. “She wants her primary family to stay intact forever. If in fact she does have to grow up, she wants to run her family orchard with her brother.”
Hamilton says her book is actually about the issue of succession in a business or farm. “Who gets to stay? Who can’t stay? Who stays but doesn’t want to stay? All of those vexing issues are in the body of our heroine.”
Like many of her novels, it’s set in a familiar landscape. “I don’t always put my books in the Midwest, entirely,” says Hamilton, “but I certainly have found plenty of material in the Midwest to keep me interested and alert and amused and edified. But when people ask me, ‘What is the meaning of the Midwestern landscape?’ it beats the hell out of me!”
Hamilton says the Madison book launch will be a festive affair “There’s going to be cake, and Laura Dronzek — who is a master baker — is going to make cookies. There’s going to be my family’s apple cider. I hope all of our Madison friends will be there. It will really be like a party.”
