In creating a white Lady Bountiful and a wise but unworldly black servant, South African Mutch has more in common with The...
South Africa before, during and after apartheid, portrayed through the eyes of a black woman and, to a lesser extent, the white woman who becomes her benefactor as well as her employer.
In 1919, Cathleen Harrington leaves Ireland and starts a new life in South Africa with her fiance, Edward, who has already settled at Cradock House in the town of Cradock in the semi-desert area called the Karoo. In 1930, Cathleen’s unmarried black South African maid, Miriam, who has become Cathleen’s close if unequal friend, gives birth to a daughter she names Ada after Cathleen’s sister back in Ireland. While devoted to her own children, sweet-natured Phil and hardhearted Rosemary, Cathleen takes Ada under her wing, teaching her to read and play the piano. Ada, a gifted musician, is in turn devoted to Cathleen, who regularly leaves her intimate diary open with the tacit understanding that Ada will read it. While Rosemary treats Ada with cold propriety (perhaps understandable given Cathleen’s clear preference for Ada over her own daughter), sensitive Phil seems remarkable, even naïvely colorblind in his affection for Ada. By the time he hugs her goodbye before leaving to fight in World War II, his friendship has romantic overtones, although it remains pure. It is adolescent Ada who nurses him when he returns. Unfortunately, Phil never comes to life as an actual character before his early death, so the unconsummated romance feels more perfunctory than tragic. More believable is Cathleen’s passionless marriage to Edward. After Edward behaves abhorrently toward Ada, she runs away in shame. But she eventually returns, remaining as committed to Cathleen and Cradock House as she is to her friends, family and comrades in the black township as they suffer increasingly harsh laws before rising in victorious defiance.
In creating a white Lady Bountiful and a wise but unworldly black servant, South African Mutch has more in common with The Help’s Kathryn Stockett than Doris Lessing or Nadine Gordimer.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01630-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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