A richly textured and deeply felt tale of life and tragedy turned into art.
A graduate student descends into madness while contemplating the relationship between the celebrated novelist James Joyce and his daughter in this labyrinthine literary mystery.
Lombardi’s novel centers on a woman who lands in a Baltimore mental hospital in 1993, where she responds to questions with enigmatic quotations from Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce. She is diagnosed with schizophrenia and identified as Molly O’Donnell, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University—hence the compulsive literary allusions—and the daughter of deceased Joyce scholar Will O’Donnell. Family, friends, and staffers try to coax her out of her psychosis but with little success. When she’s not in a medicated stupor, she’s acting out by starting fires or trying to seduce a male nurse. Interspersed with Molly’s travails in the psych ward are diary entries she wrote before her psychotic break. These cover her affairs with a married professor and a concert violinist; her vexed relationships with her alcoholic mother, domineering brother, and fragile sister; and her dissertation on the similarities between Joyce’s famously incoherent novel Finnegans Wake and the language used by schizophrenics. Her research zeroes in on Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, a schizophrenic whose symptoms mirror those Molly will display in the hospital. She theorizes that the woman’s disjointed utterances inspired Finnegans Wake and starts seeing apparitions of a derelict Lucia. Molly eventually plunges into sinister conjectures about Joyce’s relationship with his daughter, which start to color her memories of Will. Lombardi’s sprawling novel is an intense, well-observed portrait of a psychiatric patient and the obsessions that slowly undermine her sanity; an engrossing picture of literary sleuthing; a cri de coeur against intimate predations; and a moving depiction of a family torn by ugly secrets. The author’s prose has a vivid immediacy, whether she’s registering intense emotion—“How can you breathe when your lungs keep collapsing on you, like the emphysema of some five-pack-a-day smoker?” wonders Molly after a lover blithely dumps her—or a reflective lyricism. (A patient “walked alongside Molly, speaking softly to her; as they passed under the weeping willow trees Molly’s face was childlike, upturned, her slow movements for once acquiring something resembling grace.”) The result is a very Joycean exploration of a troubled psyche revealed in evocative prose.
A richly textured and deeply felt tale of life and tragedy turned into art.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781736244470
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Mumblers Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
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