Brock sketches a hazy outline of 1920s high society as seen through the eyes of a woman who would be free from its hollow...
A young socialite in Jazz Age New York City must decide between a comfortable but stifling life with her distant husband and the prospect of romance with a mysterious painter.
Brock’s debut novel examines the social and familial pressures faced by Vera Bellington, trapped in the gilded cage of a loveless marriage and bound by rules of decorum enforced by her imposing mother. Despite an impeccable education in art history from Vassar College, where she let down her hair with scandalous Southern gal pal Bea Stillman, Vera’s treated like a set piece by a husband who’s more interested in conducting “business” than paying attention to his wife. When Vera’s mother asks her to dust off her art history background and examine a painting for purchase, Vera unwittingly stumbles on a forgery ring that dredges up her repressed past and opens the door to a new acquaintance, the romantic muralist Emil Hallan. What follows is a world of trouble for both Vera and Hallan, as neither has the cunning required to stage a private affair. Predictably, their time together dissolves into misplaced suspicion and existential angst. As the novel alternates between Vera’s past at Vassar and her present unraveling, the story hints at scandals both small and large but never quite delivers on either front. This larger structural problem is exacerbated by weak secondary character development; the smoke and mirrors surrounding Hallan might just hide the fact that he’s more of a cardboard cutout fantasy than a flesh-and-blood artist, while poor Bea is left to languish in the past, along with all her vim and vigor. Since Vera’s privilege shields her from dealing with the consequences of betrayal—both of her true nature and of her friendship with Bea—even would-be antagonists offer pat advice that steers the flailing socialite toward an inevitable break with her family. If only we all had the ability to hire an avuncular private detective who swoops in at the ninth hour to confirm the meaningful struggles of our lives are always fraught, always internal.
Brock sketches a hazy outline of 1920s high society as seen through the eyes of a woman who would be free from its hollow promises. Somehow her main character wallows in indecision, even as circumstances allow for the possibility of personal growth and reinvention.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90511-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached...
An Artist of the Floating World featured Japanese characters; here, Ishiguro breaks new ground with a slow-moving rumination on the world of the English country-house butler.
For 35 years, Stevens was Lord Darlington's butler, giving faithful service. Now, in 1956, Darlington Hall has a new, American owner, and Stevens is taking a short break to drive to the West Country and visit Mrs. Benn, the housekeeper until she left the Hall to get married. The novel is predominantly flashbacks to the '20s and '30s, as Stevens evaluates his profession and concludes that "dignity" is the key to the best butlering; beyond that, a great butler devotes himself "to serving a great gentleman—and through the latter, to serving humanity." He considers he "came of age" as a butler in 1923, when he successfully oversaw an international conference while his father, also a butler, lay dying upstairs. A second key test came in 1936, when the housekeeper announced her engagement (and departure) during another major powwow. Each time, Stevens felt triumphant—his mask of professional composure never slipped. Yet two things become clear as Stevens drives West. Lord Darlington, as a leading appeaser of Hitler, is now an utterly discredited figure; far from "serving humanity," Stevens had misplaced his trust in an employer whose life was "a sad waste." As for the housekeeper, she had always loved Stevens, but failed to penetrate his formidable reserve; and at their eventual, climactic meeting, which confirms that it's too late for both of them, he acknowledges to himself that the feeling was mutual.
This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached prose; yet there is something doomed about Ishiguro's effort to enlist sympathy for such a self-censoring stuffed shirt, and in the end he can manage only a small measure of pathos for his disappointed servant.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1989
ISBN: 0679731725
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.
Another haunting mixture of history, memoir, and photo album from the author of The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Vertigo (2000).
Sebald’s fourth novel, like its predecessors, is a melancholy meditation on the dark side of human history. The unnamed narrator recounts the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, a polymath whose erudition, like the author’s, runs the gamut from his chosen field of architectural history to his avocation of zoology. Meeting by chance in the Antwerp railroad station, Austerlitz and the narrator fall easily into a learned conversation about the building itself that gradually leads to a discussion of the history and mysteries of Europe’s fortified cities. A friendship of sorts develops and the two meet from time to time, at first apparently without planning, to continue their chat as if no time had elapsed in between. Gradually, Austerlitz begins to reveal his personal history. In 1939, at the age of five, he was adopted and raised by an austere Welsh cleric and his equally forbidding wife. He knows nothing of his past until he is encouraged to explore history by an inspirational teacher. Eventually, Austerlitz discovers that he is a child of a Jewish couple who vanished in the Holocaust after sending him to England to escape—no surprise to those who are familiar with Sebald’s earlier work. Austerlitz recounts his story in a low-key, slow-moving, but utterly engrossing prose style, with almost no paragraph or chapter breaks, interrupted only by a series of eerie photographs of landscapes, architectural features, and hazily glimpsed faces. The tale is cunningly constructed around internal echoes, phrases repeated many pages apart, whose larger significance can be grasped only on repetition, and a complex, multilayered set of thematic correspondences that cannot be unraveled on a single reading.
Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50483-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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