Further evidence to cement Quin’s reputation as one of the most innovative, and most underappreciated, voices of her time.
Quin’s second novel (originally published in 1966) traces the fates of Ruth and Leonard as they settle back into binary monogamy after the death of their mysterious lodger, S, who had briefly been their invigorating third.
Ruth and Leonard are quintessential examples of the British midcentury bourgeois. Leonard works somewhat provisionally as a translator, but his real passion seems to be breeding orchids in his inherited weekend home somewhere on the coast of England. Ruth would like to be pregnant but is consistently uninterested in Leonard’s sexual advances. She channels all her eros into games she plays with her own image—considering her reflection in the mirror, trying on outfits, rearranging her body in various dissatisfied poses around their home. The couple is firmly settled in the habits of their middle age, traveling back and forth from their flat in town to Grey House by the coast, unable to break out of the stifling, claustrophobic conformity of their bourgeois repression, surrounded by the inherited clutter of the lives that came before their own. At the novel’s opening, Ruth and Leonard are also in mourning. The spring before, S had become their boarder to convalesce from an ailment that turns out to have been the aftereffects of an abortion. Enigmatic, playful, and keenly observant, S quickly became a stimulating third in their stultified lives, a person whom both Ruth and Leonard desire and confide in. When S disappears in a boating accident that may have been a suicide, Ruth and Leonard are left to pore obsessively through the journals and audio recordings she left behind. In searching for the truth about S’s death, they find instead a devastating clarity about the paucity of their own lives. Quin was a master stylist and a restless innovator in her own work. True to her inimitable form, the book develops its own method of overlapping language as Ruth and Leonard speak over and around each other, interrupted by poetically lineated sections where S’s recorded voice is represented alongside the blank space of her silences. The effect will likely make for heavy wading for many readers but results in an overheated, overcrowded novel that both dazzles and devastates in its uniquely rendered but nonetheless ubiquitous truths.
Further evidence to cement Quin’s reputation as one of the most innovative, and most underappreciated, voices of her time.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-91150-884-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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