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
Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of...
A road trip in a snowstorm takes a sinister turn for a man and his girlfriend, the novel’s unnamed narrator.
Reid’s preternaturally creepy debut unfolds like a bad dream, the kind from which you desperately want to wake up yet also want to keep dreaming so you can see how everything fits together—or, rather, falls apart. The narrator, known only as the girlfriend, is driving with her beau, Jake, a scientist, to meet his parents at the family farm. The relationship is new, but, as the title implies, she’s already thinking of calling it quits. Jake is somewhat strange and fond of philosophizing, though the tendency to speak in the abstract is something that unites the pair. The weather outside turns nastier, and Reid intercuts the couple’s increasingly tense journey with short interstitial chapters that imply a crime has been committed, though the details are vague. Matters don’t improve when Jake and the narrator arrive at the farm, a hulking collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere. The meeting with her potential in-laws is as awkward as it is frightening, with Reid expertly needling the reader—and the narrator—into a state of near-blind panic with every footfall on a basement step. On the drive back, Jake makes a detour to an empty high school, which will take the couple to new heights of the terrifying and the bizarre.
Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of intricately layered psychological torment so impenetrable it’s impossible to escape.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2692-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.
A hit-and-run in the Mojave Desert dismantles a family and puts a structurally elegant mystery in motion.
In her fourth book, Lalami is in thrilling command of her narrative gifts, reminding readers why The Moor’s Account (2014) was a Pulitzer finalist. Here, she begins in the voice of Nora Guerraoui, a nascent jazz composer, who recalls: "My father was killed on a spring night four years ago, while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” She was drinking champagne at the time. Nora’s old middle school band mate, Jeremy Gorecki, an Iraq War veteran beset with insomnia, narrates the next chapter. He hears about the hit-and-run as he reports to work as a deputy sheriff. The third chapter shifts to Efraín Aceves, an undocumented laborer who stops in the dark to adjust his bicycle chain and witnesses the lethal impact. Naturally, he wants no entanglement with law enforcement. With each chapter, the story baton passes seamlessly to a new or returning narrator. Readers hear from Erica Coleman, a police detective with a complacent husband and troubled son; Anderson Baker, a bowling-alley proprietor irritated over shared parking with the Guerraoui’s diner; the widowed Maryam Guerraoui; and even the deceased Driss Guerraoui. Nora’s parents fled political upheaval in Casablanca in 1981, roughly a decade before Lalami left Morocco herself. In the U.S., Maryam says, “Above all, I was surprised by the talk shows, the way Americans loved to confess on television.” The author, who holds a doctorate in linguistics, is precise with language. She notices the subtle ways that words on a diner menu become dated, a match to the décor: “The plates were gray. The water glasses were scratched. The gumball machine was empty.” Nuanced characters drive this novel, and each voice gets its variation: Efraín sarcastic, Nora often argumentative, Salma, the good Guerraoui daughter, speaks with the coiled fury of the duty-bound: “You’re never late, never sick, never rude.” The ending is a bit pat, but Lalami expertly mines an American penchant for rendering the “other.”
A crime slowly unmasks a small town’s worth of resentment and yearning.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4715-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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