A stellar debut. Waldman’s book reflects a much-needed understanding of American paranoia in the post-9/11 world.
The selection of a Muslim architect for a 9/11 memorial stirs a media circus in Waldman’s poised and commanding debut novel.
The jury assembled to select a design for a memorial in Manhattan represented every important interest group: a 9/11 widow, an art critic, a governor’s representative and other major stakeholders. They considered blind submissions before arriving at a garden-themed design. The one contingency they didn’t plan for was that the winner would be a Muslim, Mohammad Khan. Though he’s not especially religious and his bona fides as an architect are impeccable, Khan still becomes a target for anti-Islam firebrands, and even his defenders are left wringing their hands. Waldman skillfully presents the perspectives of a handful of major characters, including Claire, a 9/11 widow; Sean, a pugnacious victims’ activist who lost his brother in the attacks; and Mohammad, who vacillates between gloomy isolation and outspoken defiance at attempts to reject or tweak his design. Waldman shrewdly, subtly reveals the class and race divisions that spark arguments about who “owns” the design; it’s no accident that wealthy Claire played a leading role on the jury while Asma, a working-class Bangladeshi woman who lost her husband in the attacks as well, is all but unheard. Waldman, a former New York Times reporter, discusses 9/11 victims, memorial gardens and Muslim-American life, but her keenest observations are of the media. She has a canny understanding of how a New York Post front page can stoke right-wing rage, or how a New York Times article can muddy the waters. There’s a slight cartoonishness to her characterizations of cub reporters and radio hosts, but overall this is a remarkably assured portrait of how a populace grows maddened and confused when ideology trumps empathy.
A stellar debut. Waldman’s book reflects a much-needed understanding of American paranoia in the post-9/11 world.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27156-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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