A balanced exploration of the rules of marriage.
An affecting first novel successfully combines a cheeky first-person narrative with a serious look at the consequences of adultery.
Connie is as happy as she should be: A year into her marriage with Luke, the two have a charming London house, promising careers, and each other as best friends. As Connie puts it, she’s “in the middle of Happily Ever After” when she meets John Harding at a work seminar. Flattered by his accomplished flirting, and reminded of a time not so long ago when she could wrestle with the best of them, she nonetheless leaves the encounter with her marriage vows intact. When they meet again a few months later at a conference in Paris, however, the two begin an affair. The story’s winning attribute is its depiction of the relationships among Connie and her female friends, all strikingly different personalities, though all are horrified by Connie’s actions (except Lucy, who makes it a point to sleep only with married men). To justify her affair, Connie convinces herself that John may be her true destiny and Luke only a comfort. While she’s stealing afternoon hours away from work to have sex with John against alley walls, her cynical friend Lucy is falling in love (but with whose husband?), prim Daisy is getting engaged, and Rose is becoming increasingly unhappy in a marriage that consists more of changing diapers than exchanging loving glances. When John finally dumps Connie, she runs back to Luke’s innocent embrace—until the evening her drunken ex-lover sends explicit faxes to the house, and Luke moves out the same night. Can Connie get Luke back? More importantly, does she deserve to get him back? Despite the comic tone, and character analysis based primarily on detailed clothing description, newcomer Parks palpably conveys the anguish Connie experiences while still providing a relatively happy ending.
A balanced exploration of the rules of marriage.Pub Date: July 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-77543-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.
Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4726-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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