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THE BOOK BORROWER

Name: THE BOOK BORROWER
Author: Alice Mattison
ISBN: 0-688-16824-8

by Alice Mattison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

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Mattison’s third novel (after Hilda and Pearl, 1995, etc.) is actually a successful graft of two tales: one written by a 1920s feminist and radical, the other about the woman who reads that “first book” in the late 20th century. While Deborah Laidlaw and another mother, Toby Ruben, look after their children in the park, Deborah lends Toby a memoir, Trolley Girl, recounting the Lipkin sisters” involvement in a 1921 trolley strike. Miriam Lipkin writes of her two sisters; Jessie, a young radical determined to support the strike, participates in protests and stands in contrast to quiet, cheerful Sarah, who is killed in a trolley collision. Later, Jessie is implicated in what is seen as a murder, and though she’s acquitted, she’s alienated forever from her family. Miriam, meanwhile, changed her name to Berry Cooper and enjoyed modest success as a sculptor. The ’second book” deals with difficult, sometimes unpleasant people. Toby describes her friendship with Deborah from the “70s to the present, often behaving like a younger, respectful sister toward her. When she meets Deborah’s husband, Jeremiah, in a drawing class, he tells Toby of Berry Cooper’s career. After Deborah dies in an auto accident, Toby cautiously returns to the memoir she—d abandoned long ago. Berry then enters Toby’s real life when her grown-up son Peter becomes a care-giver to the now-elderly artist, and Toby takes over when Peter disappears. Still grieving for Deborah, Toby also has to confront the possible loss of her son. It’s through this ordeal that Berry serves as an oracular, nonsensical/wise guide. She’s a wonderful creation, and Mattison writes her as a quirky, unpredictable spirit, simultaneously maintaining Toby’s grave meditations on her best friend’s death. A rich, textured exploration of misfortune and its consequences: a book that will reward any reader willing to go slowly and absorb its course.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-688-16824-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
CONSCIENCE
by Alice Mattison

- BOOK REVIEW
THE KITE AND THE STRING
by Alice Mattison

- BOOK REVIEW
NOTHING IS QUITE FORGOTTEN IN BROOKLYN
by Alice Mattison

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- AWARDS
Mantel, Woodson on Women’s Prize Longlist

- SEEN & HEARD
Reese’s Book Club Reveals April Pick

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.