A stultifying amalgam of Peyton Place, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, The Return of the Native, and Tobacco Road. O Canada! O...
Toronto-based Richards (Mercy Among the Children, 2001, etc.), winner of multiple Canadian literary awards, strains both credibility and the reader’s ability to keep a straight face with this pullulating melodrama, published in Canada in 1998.
In an unnamed New Brunswick bayside town, pretty young Karrie Smith’s betrothal to farmer Tommie Donnerel is put on hold when Karrie becomes attracted to glowering Michael Skid, the ne’er-do-well son of a prominent judge. Michael, meanwhile, is smitten with gorgeous slut Madonna Braussard, who, with her Cro-Magnon brother Silver, earns an unpretty penny dealing “bad drugs”—which trade attracts the interest of satanic ex-convict Everette Hutch (“the swirling center, the black hole . . . [which] Madonna and Silver and Michael . . . were being sucked into”). A violent murder rattles the community, and the wrong man is convicted and imprisoned. A sneaky plot twist endangers the gas-station scam practiced by Karrie’s troglodyte parents. Everette crashes his motorcycle, and gives the reader a brief rest by lapsing into a coma. The plot thickens like month-old oatmeal, chickens come home to roost, the guilty are punished, justice delayed is not denied, and the innocent get married and talk it all over 20 years later. These beguiling absurdities are recounted in a burly, barely serviceable prose in which subjects and predicates often remain as far apart as feuding relatives estranged for decades (e.g., this side-winding sentence: “Is that how your new friends who we never see, and who never come to the house, and who all look like refugees, just like you, taught you how to be?”).
A stultifying amalgam of Peyton Place, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, The Return of the Native, and Tobacco Road. O Canada! O Mores!Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-650-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quick-witted and ultimately hopeful look at what it takes to make a marriage last.
A couple decides to save their relationship by attempting an open marriage.
Jessica and Mitch Butler have a happy marriage. Well, happy enough. Married for years with two children, it’s inevitable that they won’t feel the swells of passion every day, right? But when their three best couple friends get divorced around the same time, Jessica and Mitch start to reevaluate things. They thought their friends’ marriages were fine, but something tore them all apart. And, naturally, Jessica and Mitch start to wonder if the same thing could happen to them. So, to stave off the divorce that now seems inevitable, they try something dramatic: an open marriage. More specifically, an “evolved” marriage, one that allows each of them to have sex with other people, with several rules in place (no repeats, no one they know, etc.). Jessica immediately hits it off with a young, sexy bartender who sweeps her off her feet, but Mitch has more trouble connecting with women. And both of them realize, with help from their divorced friends, that dating is a lot different now that apps are on the scene. Although Jessica and Mitch’s plan may be a bit out of the box, their relationship and feelings are believable. Norman (We’re All Damaged, 2016, etc.) also creates a plethora of rounded, quirky side characters, including Jessica’s teenage therapy patient Scarlett and Mitch’s nerdy student Luke. When all of those characters come together in the story’s climax, the result is a scene worthy of a Shakespearean comedy.
A quick-witted and ultimately hopeful look at what it takes to make a marriage last.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984821-06-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.
The past isn’t even past—but the one postmodern fictionalist Levin imagines is stranger than most.
Levin turns in a big, futuristic shaggy dog tale, except that the dog isn’t so shaggy. In fact, it’s a rather tidy, lovable little critter called a Curio, or “cure,” a sort of emotional support animal that lends itself to all kinds of bad treatment. In Levin’s future—or past, that is, since most of the action ranges between the early 1980s and the early 2010s—the technological advances we’ve become used to are absent: There are no iPhones, no internet, no Facebook. You’d think that such lacunae would make people feel happy, but instead strange forms of life have been concocted, with inanimate objects capable of feeling and voicing discontent and pain as well as acquiring some of the traits the humans around them possess. Levin’s hero in this overlong but amusing story is an alienated memoirist with the science-fictional name of Belt Magnet. But then, everyone in this story has an unusual moniker: Lotta Hogg, Jonboat Pellmore-Jason, Blackie Buxman, and so forth. His cure has the name Blank, “short for Kablankey, the name I’d given it, at my mother’s suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze.” By the end of the story, even though Blank is a mass-produced laboratory thing, the reader will care for him/it just as much as Belt does—and will certainly be shocked by the horrible things some of the characters do to the inanimate and lab-born things among them. Says a guy named Triple-J, brightly, “Let’s use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops—some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn’t end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy.” If Levin’s point is that humans are rotten no matter what tools you put in their hands, he proves it again and again.
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54496-2
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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