The best parts go to horrible Bruce, treasurable Bertie and Bertie’s monstrous little schoolmate Olive. To be continued.
One hundred more slices of life from 44 Scotland Street and environs (Love Over Scotland, 2007, etc.).
The return of art student Pat’s narcissistic former flatmate Bruce from London to Edinburgh tempts Pat to fall for him once more—a situation, as she sagely realizes, that’s “precisely the sort of thing that novelists liked to write about.” Not this novelist, however: Bruce insinuates himself into vapid, good-humored Julia’s flat, and Pat gets on with her life, which is mainly devoted to discouraging the sincere, diffident advances of Matthew, her fabulously wealthy but hopelessly unglamorous boss at the Something Special Gallery. Back at 44 Scotland Street, anthropologist Domenica, returned from the Malacca Straits, is certain that her friend Antonia, who has taken the flat across the landing, nicked one of Domenica’s Spode cups while she was minding her flat. Domenica’s friend Angus hasn’t been able to paint ever since his dog Cyril was accused of biting three neighbors and incarcerated, presumably to await a lethal injection. Downstairs from Domenica and Antonia, statistician Stuart and his overbearing wife Irene continue as the very model of dysfunctional parents, their family now expanded by the arrival of baby Ulysses, who’s about to have quite an adventure for a four-month-old. But the heart of Smith’s episodic tale, which combines selfishness and tenderness, blather and unexpected insight, is Ulysses’ older brother Bertie, a six-year-old savant. Even though Irene has laid the groundwork for some serious sibling rivalry by demanding that he change his brother’s nappies and help her express breast milk for him, Bertie’s fondest wish is that Ulysses be spared the round of Mozart, saxophone lessons and psychotherapy with which his mother afflicts him.
The best parts go to horrible Bruce, treasurable Bertie and Bertie’s monstrous little schoolmate Olive. To be continued.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-38706-6
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you.
Someone told Vivian Morris in her youth that she would never be an interesting person. Good thing they didn't put money on it.
The delightful narrator of Gilbert's (Big Magic, 2015, etc.) fourth novel begins the story of her life in the summer of 1940. At 19, she has just been sent home from Vassar. "I cannot fully recall what I'd been doing with my time during those many hours that I ought to have spent in class, but—knowing me—I suppose I was terribly preoccupied with my appearance." Vivian is very pretty, and she is a talented seamstress, but other than that, she is a silly, naïve girl who doesn't know anything about anything. That phase of her life comes to a swift end when her parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg. Peg is the proprietor of the Lily Playhouse, a grandiose, crumbing theater in midtown that caters to the tastes and wallets of the locals with week after week of original "revues" that inevitably feature a sweet young couple, a villain, a floozy, a drunken hobo, and a horde of showgirls and dancers kicking up a storm. "There were limits to the scope of the stories that we could tell," Vivian explains, “given that the Lily Playhouse only had three backdrops”: 19th-century street corner, elegant parlor, and ocean liner. Vivian makes a close friend in Celia Ray, a showgirl so smolderingly beautiful she nearly scorches the pages on which she appears. "I wanted Celia to teach me everything," says Vivian, "about men, about sex, about New York, about life"—and she gets her wish, and then some. The story is jammed with terrific characters, gorgeous clothing, great one-liners, convincing wartime atmosphere, and excellent descriptions of sex, one of which can only be described (in Vivian's signature italics) as transcendent. There are still many readers who know Gilbert only as a memoirist. Whatever Eat Pray Love did or did not do for you, please don't miss out on her wonderful novels any longer.
A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59463-473-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty’s only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone.
An academic comedy of multicultural manners finds Smith recapturing the sparkle of White Teeth(2000).
Following her sophomore slump with The Autograph Man (2002), the British author returns to biting, frequently hilarious form with a novel that concerns two professors who are intellectual enemies but whose families become intertwined. Radical theorist Howard Belsey, a British art historian married to the African-American Kiki, detests the cultural conservatism of Monty Kipps, a Caribbean scholar based in England. Kipps apparently has the best of their rivalry, having raised his profile with a well-received book on Rembrandt that stands in stark contrast to Belsey’s attempts to complete a counter-argument manuscript. Through a series of unlikely coincidences, Belsey’s son becomes engaged to Kipps’s irresistibly beautiful daughter, Kipps accepts an invitation to become guest lecturer at the Massachusetts college where Belsey is struggling for tenure and the wives of the two discover that they are soul mates. As Smith details the generation-spanning interactions of various minorities within a predominantly white, liberal community, she finds shades of meaning in shades of skin tone, probing the prickly issues of affirmative action, race relations and cultural imperialism while skewering the political correctness that masks emotional honesty. As the author acknowledges in an afterword, her story’s structure pays homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, recasting the epistolary beginning of that book as a series of e-mails, while incorporating all sorts of contemporary cultural allusions to hip-hop, academic theory and the political climate in the wake of 9/11. Though much of the plot concerns the hypocrisies and occasional buffoonery of the professors, along with the romantic entanglements and social crises of their offspring, the heart and soul of the novel is Kiki Belsey, who must decide whether to continue to nurture a husband who doesn’t deserve her. While some characters receive scant development, the personality that shines through the narrative most strongly is that of Smith.
In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty’s only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-063-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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