An engrossing, interior mother-daughter story that expands into a sharp social commentary.
A woman pursuing a midlife reset finds her received notions about domesticity and justice unraveling.
In her previous smart, spiky novels, Spiotta explored the tenuous bonds between brothers and sisters (Stone Arabia, 2011) and female friends (Innocents and Others, 2016). Here the themes are motherhood and marriage, as Sam, a 50-something woman, attempts to reboot her life after Trump’s election. The protest groups she joins on Facebook are contentious (one is called “Hardcore Hags, Harridans, and Harpies”), which she at first finds inspirational. On an impulse, she leaves her marriage and buys a dilapidated historic house in Syracuse. But she still needs her husband’s financial support (she works part time in the historic home of a “problematic” 19th-century feminist), and the infighting among her activist friends soon becomes confounding. (She’s strong-armed into signing a petition censuring one woman for unexplained transgressions.) Lost in the shuffle is Sam’s ailing mother as well as Ally, her 16-year-old daughter, who's an academic high achiever seduced by her 29-year-old mentor in an entrepreneurship program. Sam processes all this in irrational, woman-on-the-brink ways (keying a truck, a disastrous turn at a stand-up open mic) that are typical in domestic-crisis novels. But Spiotta’s characterization of Sam is more complicated and slippery, as she begins to recognize that the entrapment she feels is as much a function of broader forces she’s helpless to control; shifting between Sam's and Ally’s perspectives, Spiotta asks how much leeway a mother has in a society in which patriarchal attitudes carry so much weight. A violent act at the tail end of the novel both clarifies and complicates the predicament, and Spiotta artfully contextualizes Sam’s existential crisis as part of her hometown's history. As Sam asks, for herself, and everybody: "What happened to us? When did progress become so ugly?"
An engrossing, interior mother-daughter story that expands into a sharp social commentary.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31873-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
A superb work of Soviet-era Russian literature in a welcome, well-annotated new translation.
A splendidly subversive tale of the Russian Revolution and civil war from the great laureate of the working class.
It’s astounding that Stalin, after reading Platonov and scrawling “Bastard” on one page, allowed him to escape the Gulag. Platonov’s town of Chevengur slumbers on Russia’s high steppes, where crops fail and peasants leave their farms to seek work in the cities and mines, while a few holdovers resort to “eating raw grass, clay, and bark.” Into this region, ripe for revolution, is born the Christlike Sasha Dvanov, whose father has committed suicide just to see what the afterlife is like. God appears in Platonov’s vivid novel; so does Lenin, and so does a revolutionary Don Quixote who worships the late Bolshevik icon Rosa Luxemburg, on whose behalf he swears vengeance for her assassination. This Kopionkin, whose name means “spear,” is a man of action, while Sasha speaks of big dreams: “Cultured plants will make the earth brighter and more clearly visible from other planets,” he instructs a commissar named, yes, Fyodor Dostoevsky. “And then, the circulation of moisture will increase. The sky will become bluer and more transparent!” Communism isn’t born on the land quite so seamlessly. Instead, civil war breaks out, Kopionkin riding out to meet the enemy on a Rocinante named “Strength of the Proletariat,” a horse that, he growls, has “more revolutionary consciousness than any of you.” People starve, careful plans disintegrate, Bolshevik leaders admit to never having read Marx, and the masses falter: “The communism of Chevengur was defenseless during these dark steppe hours, since people had temporarily curtailed their convictions, allowing the power of sleep to heal the exhaustion occasioned by their inner life of the previous day.” All are all too human in the face of this strange new ideology, which, Platonov daringly makes clear, is as much religious as political.
A superb work of Soviet-era Russian literature in a welcome, well-annotated new translation.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781681377681
Page Count: 640
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.
When Chi Chi Donatelli gave famous crooner Saverio Armandonada a manicure on a 1930s New Jersey beach, little did she know that the swanky singer would change her life.
After his childhood sweetheart married another man, Saverio left the security of his job on the factory line in Detroit, earning his father’s disapproval but opening wide the door to success as a big-band singer. Along his way to stardom, Saverio changed his name to Tony Arma and discovered a talent for romancing—but never marrying—the ladies. But once he meets Chi Chi, his bachelor days are numbered. From a large, boisterous Italian family, Chi Chi is eager to have a life like Tony’s, with the freedom to sing and travel the country. She wants no part of marriage with its shackles. Soon Chi Chi and Tony are touring together, eventually developing a profitable shtick, with Chi Chi writing bestselling songs and Tony serenading them to dreamy audiences. It’s only a matter of time before Tony proposes. After all, unlike his other girls, Chi Chi offers Tony not only beauty and charm, but also the stability of a home. The lovers’ work in the entertainment industry gives way to a marriage blessed with babies yet held apart by war. Once reunited, Chi Chi’s independence and Tony’s philandering further fracture their marriage. But as Tony’s path wends from woman to woman, Chi Chi forges a new life on her own terms. A mistress of the sweeping family saga, bestselling author Trigiani (Kiss Carlo, 2017, etc.) sets Chi Chi and Tony’s lifelong love affair against the grand stage of World War II through the postwar boom years and the women’s liberation movement, tracing a society catching up with Chi Chi’s determination to control her own financial and personal freedom.
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-231925-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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