A glittering, accomplished, but rather callow tale of a latter-day Lost Generation.
How empty can the lives of young, rich, beautiful people be? Find out in this jaundiced novel of contemporary mores.
Hollow dissolution comes in East and West Coast flavors in these interleaved narratives of college-aged singletons with wealthy, indulgent parents. Part I takes place at a liberal arts college in New England where an incestuous tangle of undergrads–sarcastic would-be novelist Nicole, Byronic musician Dexter, upper-crust bastard Wes, little-girl-lost Lanie–pause occasionally in their random hookups and drug-fueled partying to mope, with sly literary allusions, about the meaninglessness of their random hookups and drug-fueled partying. Part II shifts the scene to Los Angeles, where a different but intersecting group of kids enjoy a long summer vacation. The lives of these well-heeled Californians are even shallower–the cocaine more copious, the couplings more transient, the life goals restricted to cosmetic surgery and a berth in the entertainment industry. As the title hints, the authors walk in the footsteps of the master of Consumer Realist sagas of post-Reagan gilded youth. Their characters inhabit a social universe defined by musical tastes and designer-brand accoutrements. The men are preening narcissists obsessed with their abs, the women desperate waifs who wispily remember an age of innocence before the sexual debaucheries of middle school, and everyone expresses an inarticulable unhappiness by quoting muzzy rock lyrics. Weiss and Wallace sketch this world with a polished prose style, a fine ear for dialogue and pop culture and a wicked satirical edge. Unfortunately, the story comes to seem as dazed, monotonous and lightweight as its interchangeable characters. The straight-A Cal-Tech physics major is as vapid as the aspiring Playboy bunny, and their Lohan-esque excesses seem correspondingly unserious. As the Sadies and Sarahs and Samanthas trudge blearily from one party and bed to the next, even their parents have trouble telling them apart. In the end it’s almost impossible to keep track of who’s snorting what and screwing whom or why–and harder still to care.
A glittering, accomplished, but rather callow tale of a latter-day Lost Generation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4401-2073-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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