Missing a unifying narrative but nonetheless an intimate, intercontinental voyage through a series of disparate lives.
Sellen’s debut novel interweaves a series of vignettes from across the globe to create a broad diorama of modern-day culture clashes.
Lacking a centralized plot, the narrative globe-trots from one place to the next, switching among characters and places that rarely share more than a distant connection. Key personages include a Colombian cab driver who sinks into a life of crime in an attempt to lift his family out of poverty; a pair of 20-something missionaries on a mission to Delhi; a French economist who cannot relate to the Latin American populations her bank supposedly benefits; and a conservationist stationed in Ivory Coast facing the twin hurdles of crime and corruption in his attempt to preserve a UNESCO World Heritage Site. These stories in turn branch out to incorporate an impressively varied, realistic cast of characters. All walks of life are represented, but mostly, as hinted by the title, the tales develop from the desperation generated within impoverished lands. The author states in his opening acknowledgments that the novel is loosely based on people he knew while living in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Due to this personal familiarity, even the occasional far-fetched or surreal event carries a certain authenticity. At one point, the conservationist witnesses a bizarre rainstorm that deposits fish and snakes across his lawn. He explains to his startled housekeeper, “It’s something to do with tornados[sp] when they go over water. They pick up water and everything in it and drop them in another place.” The fish-out-of-water construct serves many of the characters who seem to be struggling to breathe in scenarios that are either unfamiliar or insupportable. Though skillfully narrated, their individual trials would perhaps function better as discrete and consecutively told short stories rather than placed in this haphazardly shuffled arrangement.
Missing a unifying narrative but nonetheless an intimate, intercontinental voyage through a series of disparate lives.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491068335
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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