The author of three previous novels returns with a disappointingly sedate summer romance set in a bookstore. Once again, Schine's story hinges on a piece of writing that changes a woman's life. In Rameau's Niece (1993), an 18th-century manuscript was the obsession; this time it's a love letter that arrives at Helen MacFarquhar's small, highbrow bookshop. Mysteriously addressed to ``Goat'' from ``Ram,'' the letter—and its overheated prose—spreads across Helen's well-ordered life like a stain, marking everyone who stands in its path. Lines from it echo throughout the novel (``I'm on fire. Is that too banal for you? It's not, you know. You'll see''). All who read it can't help projecting it onto their own lives. Helen, a charming but moody control freak who sells books by reckless flirtation (physical and intellectual), suddenly suspects everyone she knows of being in love with her. Could ``Ram'' be one of her doting customers? Or best friend Lucy, who manages the store? Or perhaps Johnny, the sexy, well-read college student she's employed for the summer? Inflamed by the possibilities of such a passion, Helen stumbles into a secret romance with Johnny. The author harps on the standard May-December themes, although not without humor (Helen watches MTV while Johnny reads Diana Trilling's memoir, each trying to cross the generation gap). Meanwhile, Helen is predictably shaken by the disruption of her comfortable life and by the ``desperate, uneasy bliss'' Johnny inspires. And of course her new interest in letters is reflected in the store's displays: She immediately layers the front table with...you guessed it, collections of correspondence. The intellectual pyrotechnics of Schine's previous book have given way here to frequent, but purely decorative, literary references; the pat plot betrays the author's low-key ambitions. Graceful but minor fiction.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-68996-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Here, the author of Family Pictures (1990), etc., graces us with nothing less than a disputation on the nature of love—from whence, at least in Miller's world, all other emotions (and a great deal of often extreme behavior) come. This time out, her extraordinarily intelligent, if agonized, protagonist is Charlotte Reed, a nonfiction writer and divorcee with a grown son, Ryan, and new husband, Jack, a widowed oncologist. But as the story begins, Charlotte's left Jack, presumably to get her aging mother's Cambridge home in shape to be sold—since her brother, Cam, has put their mother in a home. Charlotte's other reason for flying the coop is that she doesn't think she can hack the new marriage: Jack's teenaged daughter is a pain, and Jack himself seems unable to stop grieving for his first wife. And her real reason, she comes to understand, has to do with being afraid that she doesn't love Jack the way she used to. She yearns for a kind of wild, romantic love, and sees it in the way her brother behaves with his new flame, Elizabeth, a neighbor in Cambridge. Elizabeth has returned home because her husband is playing around. She starts doing so, too, with Cam, though for him the relationship is less a fling than an expression of his unbalanced approach to life. Tragedy strikes in the form of an accident that kills Elizabeth's au pair girl, with Cam behind the wheel. Her death sets Charlotte off on an intense emotional hegira, which eventually leads her back to Jack and a different kind of love—a love that has as much loss in it as passion. Seared by several extraordinary arguments—between Lottie and Cam and others—and by a handful of characterizations so full that they suggest whole novels revolving around Miller's secondaries. Miller's special brand of intelligent emotionalism reaches its zenith here: it's deep, resonant, splendid.
Pub Date: April 21, 1993
ISBN: 0060929995
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
Today’s intentional blurring of the line between fact and fiction continues with sometime speechwriter Tarloff’s first novel, which asks the burning question: What if “Monica Lewinsky” had a live-in boyfriend who got wind of her affair and had hurt feelings and moral outrage of his own? In this version, that boyfriend, Ben Krause, is a speechwriter drawn to Senator Charles Sheffield’s presidential campaign not so much by Sheffield’s practiced charm as by his survival among the shoals of other piranha. When Ben’s girlfriend, Gretchen Burns, lands a job in the new President’s social office, the starry-eyed couple buy a condo off Dupont Circle and settle down to the good life. Even though that life includes a growing number of invitations to increasingly exalted and intimate White House functions, and a widening gulf between the two caused by Gretchen’s unexplained absences, it takes Ben quite a while to catch on to the First Affair that his mate’s been conducting with every solicitous effort to spare his feelings—except, of course, by breaking off the relationship after Ben demands it. Tarloff’s signal achievement is his conviction in rendering Gretchen’s and Ben’s continued infatuation with the man who’s wrecking their lives—an attraction that goes far beyond their reluctance to offend the President. Both of them live for face-to-face time with the magnetic scoundrel who compares himself to Churchill in a climactic scene that, like so much else here, seems to have been written with both eyes on Primary Colors. The novel’s deeper, horrific fascination, though, lies in its nonfictional innuendos and in the sort of journalistic/historical associations hammered home by Ben’s extended citations of Suetonius, Desmond Morris, Jane Goodall, and Kirk Douglas’s autobiography. Unremarkable as fiction, but riveting for potential gossips less likely to be caught up in the soapy predicament of Gretchen and Ben than to wonder about the author’s relationship with his own spouse, former Clinton economic advisor Laura D’Andrea Tyson. (Literary Guild and Mystery Guild selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60463-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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