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
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.
A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.
Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls—less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought—and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line—mostly successfully—between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book’s final third.
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7737-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
