Although Wagman follows the contours of conventional midlife-crisis fiction with a too-easy ending, thoughtful references to...
In Wagman’s latest (The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, 2012, etc.), a cancer diagnosis and faltering marriage cause a middle-aged woman to contact the lover she hasn’t seen in years.
Fiona, who works as an art educator at the Getty Villa in LA, learns she has breast cancer in the fall of 2009. Instead of sharing the diagnosis with her husband, Harry, a bitter out-of-work journalist, or her remarkably innocent college-student son, Fiona fixates on memories of Luc, her lover when she was 19 and trying to be a dancer in New York City. A gifted dancer, Luc was handsome, charismatic, and addicted to drugs and sexual dalliances. The last time Fiona saw him, 22 years earlier, he was strung out on heroin, but according to Google, he’s become a psychologist in Orlando. After a brief email exchange, they agree to meet for a weekend in Newport, where they began a terrible sailboat trip bound for Bermuda almost exactly 30 years earlier. As 50-year-old Fiona struggles, in a first-person narrative, with her guilt about Harry—she’s told him she’s attending a conference—and her excitement at seeing Luc again, 19-year-old Fiona’s experience at sea spins out in the third person. The boat’s owner, Nathan, a doctor, hired Luc and Fiona, along with a former patient and a supposedly experienced Dutch sailor. After they embarked, despite storm warnings that grew into an actual hurricane, it quickly became apparent that Nathan had trapped them in a deranged psychological experiment. For the last three decades, Fiona has been weighted down by guilt over her behavior on the boat as well as regret at leaving Luc—expect a lot of navel-gazing. Now, faced with still-handsome middle-aged Luc and his version of events, she must confront who she really was then and is now.
Although Wagman follows the contours of conventional midlife-crisis fiction with a too-easy ending, thoughtful references to Greek myth and musings on the nature of survival give the tale a darker, deeper hue.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63246-005-9
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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