Magary has created a smartly realized vision of a planet that’s hit the skids, but it could use more interesting residents.
One man blogs civilization’s slow, terrifying decline after a cure for aging is discovered.
In 2011, an Oregon scientist discovered the precise genetic location of the trigger for aging, clearing the way to bring a halt to growing old. In 2019, when Magary’s debut novel opens, narrator John Farrell is one of the growing number of people who’ve surreptitiously signed up for the illegal "cure." He’s an easygoing attorney who hasn’t paid close attention to the religious and political furor the cure has caused, but that changes when his roommate is killed in a terrorist attack on the office of a doctor delivering the treatment. At first this brave new world seems mildly comic: John helps set up term limits for married couples who didn’t anticipate that “till death do us part” might take well over a century, and he considers what the cure means for sports records. But in the decades after the cure is legalized, the planet becomes rapidly overpopulated and the story turns dystopian, with John becoming an “end specialist” who helps euthanize people who find deathlessness a grind. Magary is blogger for the sports sites Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber, and the blog format serves him well in the early sections of the novel: It allows him to integrate newspaper articles that set the scene, and he gives John an engaging, quick-witted voice. Trickier for the author are matters of deeper characterization and tone: John’s romantic entanglements and heartbreaks are swallowed up by the events around him, and the closing chapters make ungainly shifts between apocalyptic realism and Grand Guignol horror scenes. In a way, he’s imagined this milieu all too well, making the reader more interested in the world’s end than the people trying to survive it.
Magary has created a smartly realized vision of a planet that’s hit the skids, but it could use more interesting residents.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-311982-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country—with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first—and best—book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district—with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital—where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action—the mishaps of Eva—is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1988
ISBN: 0241951658
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
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