An odd, lyrical tale from Frucht (Life Before Death, 1997, etc.) of a mother’s ghost and the lives she tends in her 30-odd years roaming the astral plans. Disembodied though fully conscious, Polly narrates her life-after-death, which is less about her life than the observation of everybody else’s. After having given birth to three sets of twins, the charmingly irrepressible Polly dies in childbirth before ever seeing her single son, Tip, and so becomes his guardian in death. When Tip is nine, camping with next door neighbor Johnny—not yet friends, not yet enemies—Polly wishes for something to fall from the sky, an event to bind the boys, giving Tip a twin by proxy, to ease the loneliness she feels she’s burdened him with. She’s thinking of a falling star, but it’s Tom Bane’s airplane that falls from the sky into the lake, creating a vengeful ghost out of Tom, who subliminally needs to punish Polly’s kin, and setting off a chain of events that shape her son’s life. Dancing in and out of the consciousness of others, Polly “visits” Tom Bane’s wife, Angie; his daughter, Honey; and Johnny’s mother, Gwen. But it’s Tip she is trying to make her way to. Slowly, all these lives begin to converge, making a strong case for the concept of destiny, or at least for the power of ghostly interference. Inheriting his mother’s charismatic glow, Tip grows into a happy Lothario, Honey into the paragon of independence, while Johnny, lured into the water by Tom Bane’s liquid bitterness, drowns, leaving Tip alone again. The narrative’s forward thrust occasionally lags, suggesting a short-story cycle, but the detours are always beautifully imagined, redeeming the slow pace of Polly’s eternity. The final, non-astral meeting is not so much a surprise as a welcome conclusion. A gentle foray into the infinite strength of love.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83589-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
Overdecorated and underplotted. Not up to Montero’s usual standard.
The lush exoticism and sinister supernaturalism of the culture of voudou are evoked in rapturous detail in this unusual novel, the fourth in English translation from the Cuban-born Puerto Rican author (The Last Night I Spent with You, 2000, etc.).
Unfortunately, it is also redundant and sluggishly paced, despite numerous dramatic foreshadowings of a confrontation between voudou priestess Zulé Revé, one of thousands of Haitians who’ve crossed borders to work on the Dominican Republic’s many sugar plantations, and her sworn enemy (and former lover) rival houngan (voudou priest) Similá Bolosse. Montero re-creates Zulé’s world with impressive (and obviously painstakingly researched) thoroughness (an appended glossary is really very helpful), layering in mythlike accounts of Zulé’s birth, her seven-year apprenticeship in a religion that blends her culture’s traditional beliefs with the principles of formal Christianity, marriage to her mentor, the houngan Papa Coridon, and her bizarre relationship with his (half-Chinese) voyeuristic son Jérémie Candé, who acts as Zulé’s “aide and bodyguard,” while passively adoring her. The story’s principal organizing device is the Gaga, a religious ritual that’s part carnival, part pilgrimage—which also dovetails into Zulé’s dangerous trek into the heartland where Similá and his murderous tonton macoutes (Haitian military police) hold sway, an Orphean journey undertaken to retrieve a wife lured away from her grieving husband. Haunting particulars effectively underscore the tale’s essential strangeness: enigmatic references to “the smoking phallus of death”; “a plague of rabid mongooses”; and the menacing figure of Baron Samedi, the traditional Haitian guardian of the souls of the dead. And Montero outdoes herself in conjuring up both the “shadow” and the reality of Similá Bolosse: equal parts man, bull, and devil; reputed to possess “three balls” and practice cannibalism; who prepares himself for battle by bathing in the blood of one hundred slaughtered goats. Alas, it’s all atmospherics; and the final showdown between Zulé and Similá is both sketchy and anticlimactic.
Overdecorated and underplotted. Not up to Montero’s usual standard.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621059-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
This better-than-average debut—about rural citizens in Collier, Va., fighting to close down a dump for out-of-state garbage—works because it tackles personal details and lets the big story take care of itself. The author, herself active in a group opposed to a similar Virginia landfill, uses a slow, soothing tone that sometimes makes it difficult to differentiate between the various first-person narratives. She does have a few impressive tricks up her sleeve, however. One of the narrators, Lucy McComb, is a dead woman who sees and knows all, including the destruction of her property to create the dump after her demise. Another, straight-talking Reba Walker, is elected head of Save Our Mountain Environment and leads the group to Richmond to protest to the state government; she also dresses the residents of the nursing home where she works in Save Our Mountain Environment T-shirts. Her nemesis, Sarah Rose McComb, is married to Lucy McComb's nephew, who sold Lucy's land believing that houses would be built there. Since then he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and Sarah is left running ``a break-even store and a farm that was crumbling around [her] ears.'' The novel has its problems. Sarah never seems a formidable enough opponent for Reba, and several long sections that seem at first like digressions take too long to reveal their significance to the story. But Schroeder renders the details of rural life with a clear, sentiment-free eye, and Reba is a feisty heroine: When a television news magazine reporter comments that she promised to bring back some quilts from Collier, Reba wonders what her chances are of selling the woman an old electric blanket instead. Like an elderly relative telling stories—some great, a few dull—and with a canny subtext.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13987-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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