A rote exercise in blockbuster-building.
Bloated beginning of a new Bradford saga about English tycoons.
Departing from the Harte series, which rode so profitably upon the coattails of A Woman of Substance (1979), this launch is strictly for Bradford devotees. The story opens in 1904 at Ravenscar, ancestral manor of Edward Deravenel, scion of an aristocratic Yorkshire family that lost control of Deravenels, a trading company dating from the Norman Conquest with worldwide outposts in mining, exporting, agriculture—and soon, oil. For 60-odd years, the Deravenel Grants, the Lancashire branch of the family, have dominated the firm, where Edward’s father, Richard, toils as an undercompensated executive. When Richard and his brother-in-law Rick, along with Edward’s brother and cousin, perish in a mysterious fire near Deravenels Tuscan marble quarry, Edward and his cousin Neville investigate, convinced the Grants had their relatives killed. The Tuscan murders can’t be traced to the Grants, nor can power-behind-the-throne Margot, wife of demented Chairman Henry Grant, be implicated in the ensuing mayhem. Edward is beset by thugs as he leaves his mistress Lily’s house in London, and Lily dies after a rampaging stallion upsets her carriage. Since Edward’s faction never lacks the wherewithal to topple the Grants, needing only to marshal the evidence of mismanagement, embezzlement and Henry’s mental incapacity, the murders—including a poisoning committed at Edward’s behest—seem beside the point, as do the perfunctory sex scenes between irresistible Edward and his ladyloves, and spitfire French temptress Margot and her company stooges. Dogged attention to detail of the dress, décor and grazing habits of the well-to-do make for a ponderous pace. Despite umpteen novels (Just Rewards, Jan. 2006, etc.), Bradford lacks finesse at getting her characters in and out of rooms.
A rote exercise in blockbuster-building.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35460-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
IN THE NEWS
"I'm Yakov Fixer... I'm the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive." He is childless, as the Talmud said, alive but dead, and deserted by his wife. He leaves his native shtetl for Kiev to pass for a few months as a goyim. Then he is arrested for having counterfeited a name and is later accused of killing a child in a ritual murder. This is the Russia of Nicholas the Second, the increasing irrationale of anti-Semitism, the prophetic "stink of future evil"— and there seems to be no question that this is Malamud's strongest book. There may be more question whether Yakov is one of his "saint-schlemiehls." He's a simple man, an ignorant man, but he reads a little (Spinoza) and he thinks. Even in his outraged innocence he knows that he is a "rational being and a man must try to reason." During these long months of interrogation and internment, he develops a certain philosophy of his own even though "it's all skin and bones." But speculate as he does, protest as he does, how accept the fact that he is one of the chosen people, chosen to represent the destiny and racial guilt of the Jews? As a Job, and several of Malamud's earlier characters have been termed Jobs, he repudiates suffering and eventually his hate is stronger than his fear... Anticipating all the inevitable comparisons to which the book is equal, Malamud's Fixer, less ideological than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, less symbolic than Kafka's Trial, has elements of each but a more exposed humanity than either of them. It is a work of commanding power.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1966
ISBN: 1412812585
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1966
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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