A powerful and beautifully written debut novel that intimately explores a fractured marriage and the struggles of modern parenthood, set against the backdrop of the chaotic spring of 2020.
PETE AND ALICE IN MAINE
Reeling from a painful betrayal in her marriage as the Covid pandemic takes hold in New York City, Alice packs up her family and flees to their vacation home in Maine. She hopes to find sanctuary—from the uncertainties of the exploding pandemic and from her faltering marriage.
Putting distance between herself and the stresses and troubles of the city, Alice begins to feel safe and relieved. But the locals are far from friendly. Trapped and forced into quarantine by hostile neighbors, Alice sees the imprisoning structure of her life in this new predicament. Stripped down to the bare essentials of survival and tending to the needs of her two children, she can no longer ignore all the ways in which she feels limited and lost—lost in the big city, lost as a wife, lost as a mother, lost as a daughter, and lost as a person.
As the world shifts around her and the balance in her marriage tilts, Alice and her husband, Pete, are left to consider if what keeps their family safe is the same thing as what holds their family together.
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“A vividly realistic portrait of day-to-day life during lockdown, of the ways the pandemic both cleaved families together and wrenched them apart. Laced with wry humor, Pete and Alice in Maine is that rare thing: a deeply intelligent page-turner.”
PRAISE
“When we first meet the title characters of Caitlin Shetterly’s gripping novel Pete and Alice in Maine, they’re fleeing pandemic ravaged New York with their children for the relative safety of their second home. How satisfying it would be in this age of easy social media judgment to despise them for their privilege. The only thing preventing it, really, is that this very fine novel—like all good novels—insists upon getting to know them. I loved it.”
“Rarely is a fictional voice so intimate, honest, and revealing. Alice’s carefully created family life is interrupted and her consequent fears are described with deep intelligence in exquisite sentences. I loved this book!”
“This novel has its thumb on the pulse of our times, the pandemic and all its costs and upheavals, our political and social fault lines, climate change as we try to raise children into a new world. Yet it is, at heart, a familiar and intimate story of a marriage and a family struggling within its own universe of hurt and betrayal. Shetterly refuses to offer easy answers in this powerful, beautifully written novel.”
“This beautifully crafted portrait of a marriage, with its backdrop of exquisite nature and troubling winds, kids balanced like boulders about to roll, is as harrowing as any thriller, and tender, too, even sweet, a couple of big-city hearts bound together despite all. And it’s a lot, this country life, these old wounds, this new one, the distance between worlds, this fateful question: who are we when we’re not who we were? Bring a flashlight, because Pete and Alice in Maine will keep you up asking all night.”
“Caitlin Shetterly’s fantastic new novel contains such resonant, crucial clues about what a woman gives up for her marriage and how she gets lost. It’s also a novel about what forgiveness can look like and a certain kind of finding of oneself.”
“This is the novel I’ve been waiting to read. Caitlin Shetterly’s brilliant take on what happens when the worst happens to a couple days before the pandemic locks them together is simply fabulous. Funny and fierce, compassionate and uncompromising—I could continue pairing complimentary adjectives forever—best just to buy it and clear a weekend. You won’t want to put it down.”
“Pete and Alice in Maine is a tender, big-hearted, clear-eyed portrait of a marriage, and a family, in crisis—set during the plague years when the entire world was in crisis. As she investigates the insidious effect of lies, betrayal, fear, and anger, not to mention the mundane joys and wrenching heartaches of everyday life, Caitlin Shetterly gets to the heart of what it means to be a family.”
“What literature is going to come out of the present moment? How do things look from where we are right now? Caitlin Shetterly’s Pete and Alice in Maine is one answer. A comfortable New Yorker and her family escape the city during the pandemic, but all is not well. Voice-driven, relatable, and very contemporary, this novel is a beautifully-written depiction of the inner lives of a small family and the land to which they briefly escape.”
“In this taut, riveting novel, Shetterly has created a lush, raw world: a passionate and damaged marriage; a family coming apart and knitting back together during a pandemic; a starkly unwelcoming place that becomes home. In all its multi-layered emotional facets, this book cuts deep, moving and true to the end.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Alice appeared one evening in April of 2020, when I was down-stairs by the fridge in the dark before bed. My husband was up-stairs, the house was quiet. And her voice came to me. I knew immediately it was Alice, a character I dreamed up many years ago, but had not done anything with. Alice is a New Yorker with a second house in Maine. And now Alice wanted to come to Maine with her husband, Pete, to find refuge from the virus.
Since that March, as Covid descended, I had been concerned about people from away coming to Maine to buy up all the toilet paper, rent Airbnb’s, or retreat to their second houses. I was worried they might take up all the hospital beds. Maine, where I was born and raised, is a poor and aging state. And, at least in our town, our grocery store was rationing toilet paper out of their back room to two rolls a family.
So, when Alice’s voice appeared in my head, I told her to go away, I didn’t have time—I was homeschooling my kids, for God’s sake! And it was too complicated for me to understand her point of view. But she wouldn’t leave. Suddenly I was writing a book about how privileged white people were coming to my vulnerable state. But as I humanized them, I realized that they also carried problems with them and were also seeking safety.
There’s a joke in our family: When someone asks us how a trip or vacation was, we’ll say, “It was great, but we took ourselves with us.” I realized that Pete and Alice might have money and a nice car and a second house, but, like all of us, they bring themselves, too.
2020 was quite a year for my family: Shortly after Alice became my Ancient Mariner, my husband lost his job and went on unemployment. Then, in the fall, while we continued to home-school our kids, I got sick from an autoimmune storm, likely triggered by a virus, which attacked my left eye, my thyroid, and then my pancreas. My eye and thyroid recovered, thankfully, but my pancreas did not. I was diagnosed in January of 2021 with autoimmune type-1 diabetes.
I am a child of divorce and, though I have been married now for fifteen years and have two sons, I can’t say I know any better what magic recipe has so far kept my marriage intact. I am always surprised when some friends’ marriages reach the breaking point when they seemed fixable, at least to me; and others that don’t seem fixable stay together. Pete and Alice became a way for me to explore my questions on the page.
As I started writing from Alice’s perspective, I found myself circling back to important questions I have had—increasingly— about my home state: Who gets to find sanctuary here? What happens to the natural world of Maine when many more people come? How will the influx of new people affect my Maine?
I wrote these pages like I was in a trance. I wrote around the edges of my health crisis, sheltering in place, homeschooling my kids, planning grocery budgets, and stressing about everything that was happening in our country and world. Funnily enough, Pete and Alice became a sort of refuge for me; a reprieve from my own life.
