Benedict Arnold isn’t a name that’s popular among patriotic Americans, but Pataki delivers an admirable book focused on the...
A young lady’s maid is witness to Benedict Arnold and his wife’s treachery in this fictional account set during the American War for Independence. This is the first novel from Pataki, daughter of former New York State Governor George E. Pataki.
In a well-balanced narrative that interweaves historical detail with the lives of servant Clara Bell and her employers, Peggy Shippen Arnold and her husband, Pataki successfully captures an infamous act in American history. Following the death of her grandmother, Clara is received in the prominent Shippen home in Philadelphia, where she serves socialite sisters Betsy and Peggy. Peggy, the self-centered, calculating, beautiful sister, immediately dominates Clara’s time. She’s besotted with a British officer and is sympathetic to the loyalist cause—at least until the British flee the city and a rough-hewn colonial military governor, Benedict Arnold, arrives. Arnold, though much older and lame, represents social prominence to Peggy, and he falls for her manipulative wiles and showers her with goods he’s confiscated from British merchants. After they’re married, though, Peggy discovers Arnold can barely sustain the lifestyle she desires. He’s used much of his own wealth to pay his troops, and he’s yet to be reimbursed. Additionally, Arnold soon faces charges brought by his rival, the governor of Pennsylvania. Although most charges are dismissed, Arnold’s angry and believes he’s been treated unjustly. Peggy, ever the opportunist, recognizes a chance for monetary gain and seeks to reconnect with former lover John André, now head of British Intelligence. Although her husband initially resists, she convinces him to seek a commanding position at West Point, which paves the way for their ultimate act of treason. Clara is horrified as she observes the scheme unfold—she is, after all, a lowly servant who must worry about her future—but she’s also a patriot who does her best to foil the plot. Those familiar with U.S. history may already know how Arnold’s saga unfurls, but the author’s interpretation of events offers fresh perspective, plenty of intrigue and a host of interesting, multidimensional characters.
Benedict Arnold isn’t a name that’s popular among patriotic Americans, but Pataki delivers an admirable book focused on the betrayal.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3860-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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