A lyrical but unyielding work about getting older.
Three Australians look back on lives of dissatisfaction in Tarwin’s fragmentary debut novel.
An aging, unnamed magistrate has come to Sydney on holiday with his wife. Restless and plagued by memories, he ventures to a suburb to visit his brother Richard, whom he hasn’t seen in four years. Richard is still grieving the death of his son, who drowned in Greece under circumstances that Richard has never understood. The reunion doesn’t get off to a very friendly start: “—Sure I can’t tempt you with a drink? —Water, the magistrate said pointedly. —Really. I preferred you when you were a drunk… —I preferred you when you had a son.” The novel tracks both men as they grapple with their ghosts, and it also tells the story of Maria Yael Kaplan, a Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor. Years ago, Richard had an affair with Maria’s daughter, and then offered his son to be the old woman’s helper. As the novel plays with each character’s memories, Tarwin explores the nature of the loss, remorse, and frustration that comes with age. The novel unfolds in short chapters, written in a discursive, sometimes-dense modernist prose: “Stand in the absence of motion. All that is left is to gather your disappointments scattered beneath the widening twilight; watching as they are weaved into the dusk’s story.” It’s not a book that seeks to accommodate readers; several major characters are nameless, and it achieves its ends via accumulation and repetition, rather than traditional narrative structure. Maria is the most accessible character, in part, because her story is told via several interviews with a single, mysterious figure. Her connection to the brothers is loose, though, and the dispute at the center of the magistrate’s relationship with Richard is never fully clarified—one of several unknowns that the novel resists resolving. How much enjoyment the reader gets out of it all will likely depend on their fondness for the work of such authors as Virginia Woolf and her disciples.
A lyrical but unyielding work about getting older.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-646-82807-7
Page Count: 183
Publisher: October Editions
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
None
In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur ("I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct").
None
NonePub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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