Cusset asks us to believe that an extremely detailed and accurate book could be written about the life of a noncelebrity by...
French-born Cusset’s first novel written in English: suspenseful, interesting, and challenging, but ultimately unsatisfying.
Jane, a young French professor at a prestigious university not unlike Yale (where Cusset teaches French), finds a package on her doorstep that turns out to be a novel detailing her adult life, marriage, and numerous affairs. This book-within-a-book is presented in its entirety, interspersed with scenes of Jane’s mounting anxiety as she tries to puzzle out who could have assembled the information to write such a novel, and why. Was it Bronzino, the manipulative department head with whom she had a brief affair? Writer/editor Josh, her college boyfriend? Ex-husband Eric, for whom she still carries a torch? Francisco, her close friend in the Spanish department? Alex or Allison, to whom she has spilled her guts, respectively, in e-mail and in person? Or was it some other mysterious, sinister, and obsessive person? Unfortunately, the central tension is quickly dissipated as the reader comes to realize that nobody could have written the novel but an omniscient narrator with access to virtually every detail and feeling in this woman’s life down to the exact words she spoke. (As she reads, Jane occasionally quibbles with a feeling attributed to her, but with one exception she never questions the smallest fact or a word of dialogue.) And a lot of fancy footwork can’t disguise the fact that this is an ordinary story of a young woman, her failed marriage, and a string of affairs, related in workmanlike but undistinguished prose.
Cusset asks us to believe that an extremely detailed and accurate book could be written about the life of a noncelebrity by any one of a half dozen friends and acquaintances. Perhaps such a premise can be realized successfully in fiction, but not this time out.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0299-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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