"Lives of quiet desperation"—or a literary study of hapless people living unhappy lives.
Prize-winning short-fiction author Bartelmay debuts with literary fiction unraveling the fate of six snakebit souls.
The setting is Middleville, near Peoria, Ill., doubtless symbolic for American life circa 1950-2000. Chic Waldbeeser is the younger son in a dysfunctional family. Diane von Schmidt is a teacher’s daughter. In 1950, the two marry immediately after high school, honeymoon clumsily in Florida and settle down to be supported by Chic’s employment in a pumpkin processing plant. Chic’s father, a traumatized World War I veteran, had committed suicide. Chic’s brother, Buddy, turned 18, left home and became an itinerant coin dealer. Their detached mother lurks in Florida. Chic is emotionally stunted, unambitious, befuddled by reality and not very smart. Diane is jealous of Lijy, Buddy’s wife, an Indian woman from California, her resentment sparked by Chic’s undisguised admiration of Lijy’s sensuality. Chic and Diane produce a prodigy son, whom neither parent understands. Still a child, the son drowns. Diane falls into depression, comforted by food and Norman Vincent Peale. Sexually naïve and stymied Chic, lonely and introverted, stumbles through a life soon fractured when Lijy has an affair, becomes pregnant and asks Chic to accept responsibility, foolishly believing Buddy will be more forgiving. The narrative flits back and forth in time, weaving in the saga of Buddy and Lijy, whose marriage collapses and then reforms after they open a health-food store and massage salon. Into the Middleville mess drop Green Geneseo and Mary Norwood. Green, a retired Las Vegas bank teller, fancies himself a bookie. Mary, married multiple times, has been a pool hustler and barmaid. Both want someone to take care of them; neither can care for the other; and Chic is soon caught up in their mutual misery. Symbolism and metaphor are rife as the story unfolds, and only Buddy, Lijy and their son lurch toward happiness, while Chic remains mired in existential crisis, too ignorant to understand and too inept to overcome.
"Lives of quiet desperation"—or a literary study of hapless people living unhappy lives.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-935439-77-6
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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