The milieu is perfectly captured, but the storyline relies heavily on melodrama to propel the action forward. And the...
A rather plodding second effort from Schneider, founding editor of The Hungry Mind Review (now The Ruminator Review), returns to the themes and settings of his debut (Blue Bossa, 1998).
Set in 1964 in San Francisco, it chronicles the “secret love” between Jake Roseman, a middle-aged Jewish lawyer and civil-rights activist, and Nisa, a mulatto actress 20 years his junior. Two years before the action begins, Jake’s violinist wife, Inez, drove her car into a concrete embankment; Jake believes she committed suicide, though he allows his prepubescent children, Anna and Joey, now 15 and 9, to suppose her death an accident. The three Rosemans live with Jake’s father, Isaac, a cantankerous old violinist (Inez was his prize student) who harbors racist feelings and attempts to stymie Jake’s efforts on behalf of the shvartzehs by sending anonymous hate mail to his office. While Nisa and Jake cavort around the city—leading sit-ins, speaking at rallies, protesting outside the Republican convention—Peter, Nisa’s gay and Jewish best friend, embarks on a doomed relationship with Simon, the troubled son of Reverend Junius Sims, cologne-drenched leader of the city’s black community (and friend of Jake Roseman’s). After the first glow of their romance wears off, Nisa and Jake’s relationship becomes troubled: he refuses to introduce her to his family (fearing his father’s reaction), and she—as a result—finds herself disillusioned with a man who speaks publicly about equality, yet will not invite a dark-complexioned woman into his home. Jake’s problems with his father, and continued obsession with Inez (who appears to him as a ghost), contribute to their strife. As race relations in the city grow increasingly strained, the two sets of lovers struggle to work out their differences.
The milieu is perfectly captured, but the storyline relies heavily on melodrama to propel the action forward. And the often-stagey dialogue is no help. Disappointing, if often engaging.Pub Date: March 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89492-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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