Having produced wonders in two earlier novels (The Patron Saint of Liars, 1992; Taft, 1994), Patchett here conjures up a striking tale of pain and enchantment as an L.A. woman, who lost the love of her life after a few short months of marriage, finds unexpected consolation from her husband's family—a family she never knew he had. When Parsifal the Magician died suddenly of an aneurism, he left his assistant of 22 years, the statuesque Sabine, whom he'd recently married after his longtime gay partner Phan's death, heartbroken and numb. He also left a rude surprise: The family he always spoke of as dead is in fact alive and well in Alliance, Nebraska—and his mother and younger sister are soon on their way to see Sabine. Seemingly decent folk, the two women return home leaving her mystified as to why Parsifal (born Guy Fetters) would have denied their existence. And so, lonely and still paralyzed with grief, Sabine decides to visit them in the dead of a Nebraska winter, hoping for relief and some answers. She gets more than she bargained for when older sister Kitty, herself married to an abusive husband, reveals that Parsifal had accidentally killed his father in trying to keep him from beating their pregnant mother. After he did time in the reformatory, his family lost touch with him completely—until one night when they saw him and Sabine on the Johnny Carson show. The nightly replay of a video of that show became a family ritual of hope, especially for Kitty's two boys, now teenagers as desperate to get away as their uncle had been. Sabine, quite a magician herself, begins a process of healing for them all, and with it comes realization of the hope that the family had long cherished. Masterful in evoking everything from the good life in L.A. to the bleaker one on the Great Plains, and even to dreams of the dead: a saga of redemption tenderly and terrifically told. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100263-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
Well-written and insightful but so heartbreaking that it raises the question of what a reader is looking for in fiction.
A 12-year-old boy is the sole survivor of a plane crash—a study in before and after.
Edward Adler is moving to California with his adored older brother, Jordan, and their parents: Mom is a scriptwriter for television, Dad is a mathematician who is home schooling his sons. They will get no further than Colorado, where the plane goes down. Napolitano’s (A Good Hard Look, 2011, etc.) novel twins the narrative of the flight from takeoff to impact with the story of Edward’s life over the next six years. Taken in by his mother’s sister and her husband, a childless couple in New Jersey, Edward’s misery is constant and almost impermeable. Unable to bear sleeping in the never-used nursery his aunt and uncle have hastily appointed to serve as his bedroom, he ends up bunking next door, where there's a kid his age, a girl named Shay. This friendship becomes the single strand connecting him to the world of the living. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we meet all the doomed airplane passengers, explore their backstories, and learn about their hopes and plans, every single one of which is minutes from obliteration. For some readers, Napolitano’s premise will be too dark to bear, underlining our terrible vulnerability to random events and our inability to protect ourselves or our children from the worst-case scenario while also imagining in exhaustive detail the bleak experience of survival. The people around Edward have no idea how to deal with him; his aunt and uncle try their best to protect him from the horrors of his instant celebrity as Miracle Boy. As one might expect, there is a ray of light for Edward at the end of the tunnel, and for hardier readers this will make Napolitano’s novel a story of hope.
Well-written and insightful but so heartbreaking that it raises the question of what a reader is looking for in fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-5478-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.
Better known as the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker in his day job as general manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre is the focus of Irish writer O’Connor’s atmospheric new novel.
Mind you, there are plenty of nods to his famous horror story, from a ghost in the theater’s attic named Mina to a scene-painter named Jonathan Harker, plus the fact that the dreaded vampire bears a more than passing resemblance to Stoker’s mercurial boss, legendary actor Henry Irving. Harker turns out to be a woman, a twist that suits the seething homoerotic currents between Stoker and Irving, who can also be found entwined in the naked arms of co-star Ellen Terry. Terry’s voice as recorded in 1906—funny, bitchy, extremely shrewd about her acting partner’s gifts and limitations—offers a welcome counterpoint to the sometimes overly dense third-person narrative of Stoker’s tenure at the Lyceum and on tour in the late 1870s and '80s, grappling with Irving’s neuroses while striving to snatch some time for his own writing. This is a tougher, colder work than Ghost Light (2011), O’Connor’s previous fictional excursion into theatrical lives, and that novel’s portrait of actor Molly Allgood’s love affair with playwright John Synge was gentler than this one of Stoker’s thorny relationship with Irving, a toxic blend of need, rage, resentment, and profound love. Still, the men’s bond is as moving and more unsettling, proof that, as Stoker later tells Harker, “Love is not a matter of who puts what where but of wanting only goodness and respectful kindliness for the loved one.” Irving seems less deserving of such kindness than Stoker’s assertive wife, Flo, who makes sure he gets copyright protection for the vampire story his boss cruelly dismisses as “filth and tedious rubbish from first to last.” Flo’s tender letter to Terry after Stoker’s death closes the novel, with another affirmation that “There are many kinds of love. I know that. He did, too.”
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-593-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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