Artlessly written albeit painless to read. Newcomer Bardi seems to want to say something about a world informed by...
A twist on the stranger-comes-to-town genre that’s long on plot and short on art, with some extra points-of-view thrown in to ensure novel-length.
Fred Brown was a prophet—and the “Fredian” cultists now all wear plain brown clothes in his honor. This is all we know about the religion of Mary Fred, a girl-cultist who has a supermodel’s bone structure behind all the, well, nothing. M.F. finds herself assigned to a foster home after two of her brothers die from curable diseases and her parents are jailed for neglect. Enter the Cullisons, a late-’90s nontraditional family comprised of spinster mother, valley girl daughter, and druggie uncle. The antics begin. True happiness, it seems, lies somewhere between a cult’s conservatism and the rampant televisionized disaster of suburbia. M.F. is soon watching the worst of daytime TV and even being sarcastic, but just as surely as she begins to change, so do the Cullisons. Before long, they eat dinner as a family unit, sister Heather becomes a productive member of society, and even Uncle Roy does his drugs “more judiciously.” But the fun can’t last forever: the “Big Cat,” a catastrophe predicted by the Fredian Bible, is just around the corner—and if that isn’t enough to rock the boat, a little violence stolen from the real world’s headlines will do the trick. The problem here is in the execution: every time a bit of momentum is established, Bardi shifts to a new first-person narrator, each less relevant than the last. We start with M.F.—so dubbed by hip Heather—and move on through the family. By the time we return to the main character—after a number of tedious, abject subplots—it’s too little, too late.
Artlessly written albeit painless to read. Newcomer Bardi seems to want to say something about a world informed by television, but the story itself is so dependent on television that the strategy founders.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1193-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
A novel in which relationships develop more from pragmatism than passion.
At the intersection of love, art, and politics, characters within a romantic triangle and a few just outside it discover that they're puppets whose strings have been pulled by a bureaucracy and whose fates are connected in ways beyond their control.
The latest from a novelist who's both been a Marine and worked in the White House opens with a reception for photographer Peter, an American expatriate in Istanbul, to celebrate his provocative series of shots from a recent protest in Istanbul. Among the attendees is Catherine, another expatriate American and the wife of a high-profile Turkish real estate magnate; she is having an affair with Peter, and much to his surprise, she's brought her young son, William, to the reception. Addressing the party is Kristin, an American diplomat in Cultural Affairs, who has apparently helped facilitate the photographs (and perhaps the protest that they document). The reception is being held at the apartment of Deniz, the director of the gallery presenting the exhibition. Catherine’s husband, Murat, waits at home for his wife and son, who return much later than he had anticipated. There is a blowout; Catherine and William flee to Peter, and she hopes they can return to America with him. The rest of the novel alternates the narrative tension of a woman caught between two men over the course of a single day, with flashbacks that provide context on the marriage, the affair, the protest, and the much larger web in which these characters are caught, mostly without their knowledge. The novel is deftly plotted, though the characters themselves seem more like pawns in the author’s narrative scheme, lacking much flesh-and-blood depth, though perhaps this is a reflection of the “moral hollowness” that Catherine suspects in herself, as she is suspended between a marriage of convenience and what might seem to be an affair of convenience. As Kristin says, “Each of us has to live....No matter how we do it.”
A novel in which relationships develop more from pragmatism than passion.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52181-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Book-club spotlighting is bound to introduce Irving's particular brio to its largest audience yet; his newest book is characteristically broad and eager, Heir to a shoe-manufacturing fortune and a Wellesley dropout, Jenny Fields becomes a nurse, which isn't quite the thing for a girl of her station. Girls of her station also have some use for men, while Jenny uses one man for one purpose only and only once: she calculatedly gets herself impregnated by an accidentally lobotomized war-veteran patient, Technical Sergeant Garp. Moreover, Jenny defies convention by writing and publishing, late in life, a memoir (entitled "A Sexual Suspect") that quickly becomes a feminist bible. Her son, T. S. Garp (named for his father), grows up meanwhile with writerly instincts of Ids own; Jenny whisks him off to Austria for an education richer in life than college would afford, and Irving shuffles Jenny offstage in order to concentrate on young Garp: his marriage to bookish Helen, his two young sons, Helen's half-hearted affair with a graduate student, and then a grotesque accident involving the entire family that maims one son, kills the other, and (by plot-tinkering) literally dismembers the cuckolding grad student. Also offered are samples of Garp's manuscripts during this time, presumably objective correlatives to Garp's life at the time, but more like a handy hole for loose and incompatible prose efforts the book would not otherwise graciously host. Jenny comes back near book's end, getting herself assassinated at a feminist political rally, but it's Garp's (and Irving's) version of the world that's in control by then. That version is richly anecdotal—almost a brocade of digression—and mostly involved with the same basically inert topics that Irving's earlier books were made of: Vienna, wrestling, wife-swapping, boy's schools, novelists. Despite the withit trappings (feminism, etc.), Irving's wild stylistic scrabble up and down the keys resolves itself into a few leaden theme chords that his veteran readers will wish that he'd broken free of by now. But this hint of staleness will be all but totally disguised to first-time readers: Irving's style and zest remain superb, and his fondness for children—his anxiety over them and their welfare—is as rare and fine and affecting and pure as Heller's or Cheever's.
Pub Date: May 1, 1978
ISBN: 0679603069
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1978
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