An overly busy exploration of white privilege and new money colliding with the old economy.
A wayward academic tries to make a fresh start emotionally and professionally in economically devastated Detroit.
Greg “Marny” Marnier, the narrator of this sophisticated if earnest novel, is a Yale grad who’s spent his post-college career in a go-nowhere adjunct teaching gig in Wales. At a class reunion he reconnects with Robert, a wealthy investor who invites him to return stateside to take part in Starting-From-Scratch-in-America, a scheme to fix up houses on 600 acres of abandoned Detroit land investors have purchased. As a history teacher, Marny can’t avoid thinking in pioneer metaphors: this “New Jamestown” attracts a pell-mell batch of hippies, tea partiers, do-gooders, and folks just eager to live off the grid. But while the effort attracts national attention—President Barack Obama drops in for a visit and Marny gets roped into a pickup basketball game with him—the (mostly black) locals tend to see the (mostly white) migrants as an occupying force. Marny is a likable if naïve bridge-builder, finding common ground with Nolan, a tough-talking single dad, and pursuing a relationship with Gloria, a schoolteacher. But it gives nothing away to say that Starting-From-Scratch-in-America doesn’t quite work out as planned, and the novel echoes Marny’s disappointment that a community with a clean slate couldn’t shrug off its old baggage about economics and race. Indeed, Markovits implies that the bonds that hold together communities are frustratingly weak (the first sign the colony is collapsing involves a stolen iPhone). Markovits gamely works to make this a realistic and nuanced portrait of modern-day Detroit while keeping the plot moving with some humor and romance, and he’s careful not to make the city’s problems simplistically black and white. But the story does bog down in a mass of representative characters.
An overly busy exploration of white privilege and new money colliding with the old economy.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237660-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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