Sluggish pace and colorless prose don’t add up to much of a mystery, in this seventh novel from the author of Suspicion...
What if a happy gang of teenagers take a vow in 1972 to reunite twenty years later, and one of them seems to have vanished?
Whatever happened to Angel Busky? Beautiful Angel was sexually adventurous, collecting high-school virgins just for the fun of it, planning to have six children by six different men, and the like. Two decades later, Willa, the smart girl of the ragtag group, wonders about her erstwhile bosom buddy. Willa’s become the writer of a tell-all biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which has inexplicably found avid readers. At a book signing, she runs into still-handsome Patrick, another member of the gang, now an NYU professor. He doesn’t know what became of Angel, either, but they catch up on bad boy Caleb; Jeremiah, the virgin geek; Shake, the harmonica player; Vinny, the tough-talking guinea; and Travis, the stoner. Willa wants to dig deeper, being no stranger to the dark side of human nature: Her husband Simon, a criminal lawyer, died when a tenement, the site of his love nest with a lady judge, collapsed. Willa was shattered but she keeps busy raising her 14-year-old daughter Chloe—and fretting lately about the pretty teenager’s sudden interest in a delivery boy. She hires p.i. Jovan Luisi to find Angel or figure out what happened to her, not knowing that the taciturn investigator is instantly smitten with her. There’s a long road ahead, covering everyone’s post–high-school history: Travis builds abode houses in the Southwest; Caleb married a rich widow and got into unsavory schemes; Vinny has a gas station and auto-repair shop; Shake still makes that old harmonica moan and wail. But what about Jeremiah? He was always a little strange, but now . . . . Some screaming, some skulking around in the woods, until the not-surprising truth is revealed in a lackluster denouement.
Sluggish pace and colorless prose don’t add up to much of a mystery, in this seventh novel from the author of Suspicion (1999), etc.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0599-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's...
A young woman with a knack for trick shooting heads west in the late 1800s to track down her outlaw brother.
Jessilyn Harney, the folksy narrator of Larison’s third novel (Holding Lies, 2011, etc.), has grown up watching her family lose its grip on its prairie homestead: Her mother died young, and her father is an alcoholic scraping by with small cattle herds. He’s also persistently at loggerheads with Jess' brother, Noah, who eventually runs off to, if the wanted posters are to be believed, lead a Jesse James–style criminal posse. So when dad dies as well, there’s nothing for teenage Jess to do but head west to find her brother, which she does disguised as a man. (“A man can be invisible when he wants to be.”) Her skill with a gun gets her in the good graces of a territorial governor (Larison is stingy with place names, but we’re near the Rockies), which ultimately leads to Noah and a series of revelations about the false tales of accomplishment that men cloak themselves with. Indeed, Jess’ success depends on repeatedly exploiting false masculine bravado: “I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm,” she writes. The novel’s plot is a familiar Western, with duels, raids, and betrayals, brought thematically up to date with a few scenes involving closeted sexuality and mixed-race relationships. But its main distinction is Jess’ narrative voice: flinty, compassionate, unschooled, but observant about a violent world where men “eat bullets and walk among ghosts.” The dialogue sometimes lapses into saloon-talk truisms (“Men is all the time hiding behind words”; “Being a boss is always knowing your true size”). But Jess herself is a remarkable hero.
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's voice is engaging and down-to-earth.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2044-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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