For all Lewis’s sharply etched paranoia and panic, the irresistible premise of his plot is buried under a barrel of...
An all-too-believably routine mistake plunges a London corporate attorney’s life into unbelievable turmoil.
Even more than most rising juniors at Madison & Vere, Lewis Penn’s got a lot on his mind. He’s being pressed to take on new jobs with impossible deadlines; his latest girlfriend doesn’t want to see him again; and his brother Dan, stricken with multiple sclerosis since childhood, is dying in a Bristol hospice. So it’s no wonder that he arrives back at the office following a meeting with UKI, a Ukrainian mineral company that’s one of M&V’s major clients, having lost along the way the folder of confidential financial information he was supposed to review. Or has he really lost it? When some quick searches and a few phone calls don’t turn it up at the most likely places, Lewis wonders if he ever took the folder in the first place. Retracing his steps to UKI in a bravura sequence that shows just how little he remembers about the meeting, he finds the folder and makes off with it. As events soon disclose, however, his maneuver is much more a theft than he realized: UKI is now clearly missing a second folder, one that security chief Viktor Hadzewycz is so eager to retrieve that it might as well be radioactive. Too late, Lewis realizes he’s already copied the suspect folder and messengered it to M&V’s branch in Washington, from which his efforts to retrieve it will land him in trouble that will deepen and broaden until it involves not only the police on two continents but also, rather improbably, bedridden Dan.
For all Lewis’s sharply etched paranoia and panic, the irresistible premise of his plot is buried under a barrel of flashbacks, side trips, maundering, and dire hints whose import is never quite clear: a first novel that never lives up to its considerable promise.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-239-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing.
A debut novel about class strife, masculinity, and brotherhood in contemporary Trinidad.
Adam—herself a native of Trinidad—tells the story of Paul and Peter Deyalsingh, twins of Indian descent whose lives rapidly diverge. Paul is socially awkward, a bundle of nervous tics and strange habits, and from a young age he is dubbed unhealthy by his industrious father, Clyde, who works tirelessly doing physical labor at a petroleum plant in order to afford a better life for his children—or, at least, one of them. As he ages, his family becomes convinced that he is "slightly retarded," and he is marked as doomed in comparison to his precociously intelligent brother, Peter—the "healthy" child. After Peter's unexpected success on a standardized test, Clyde and his wife, Joy, single him out as gifted while communicating to Paul that his possibilities are far more limited. Joy works hard to keep her children together—"The boys are twins. They must stay together," she frequently demands—but Peter's intellectual gifts create a chasm between him and Paul. Peter is destined to leave the island, while Paul's horizon never exceeds hard labor, like his father before him. Despite the efforts of Father Kavanagh, a kindly Irish Catholic priest who takes it upon himself to teach Paul, the family is forced to make an irrevocable decision that will determine the boys' fates. Adam excels at sympathetically depicting the world of economic insecurity, unpredictable violence, limited opportunity, and mutual distrust that forces Clyde and Joy to make their fateful decision. Unfortunately, however, the novel telegraphs its biggest plot twist. One can see the narrative gears turning very early, and as a result Clyde's decision isn't harrowing; by the time its necessary consequences unfold, a reader might be less moved than Adam hopes. It doesn't help that many of the characters are sketchily drawn at best. Clyde, Joy, and Peter are not vividly depicted, and the decision that renders Paul disposable seems to emanate out of a psychological vacuum. In the absence of any emotional stakes, the last third of the novel unfolds like a generic thriller. That's unfortunate, as Adam has otherwise written an incisive and loving portrait of contemporary Trinidad. Paul is the most fully realized character: Adam movingly depicts his struggle to break free of his family's conceptions of his abilities. As a result, the novel is most moving when it becomes a heart-rending character study of post-colonial adolescence that recalls V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming.
A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57299-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: SJP for Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful, poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers, the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom, the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty—the kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as compact as haiku—at the same time, a page-turner full of twists. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100100-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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