WOMAN NO. 17

Name: WOMAN NO. 17
Author: Edan Lepucki
ISBN: 978-1-101-90425-1

by Edan Lepucki ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2017

Always enjoyable if not always believable, this novel succeeds by staying light on its feet. Or, as one character puts it,...

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In the Hollywood Hills, a smart, damaged mother of two hires a nanny so she can work on a memoir—but the younger woman is no less a piece of work than she is and intent on an art project of her own.

Lepucki’s (California, 2014, etc.) third work of fiction is a stylish dramedy in he said, she said style. One narrator is Lady Daniels, who has just sold a memoir based on a magazine article she wrote about her 18-year-old son, Seth, a charismatic child who's never spoken though he has no disability and can communicate with irony and insight using American Sign Language, his iPad, and his Twitter feed. Now she needs someone to take care of Devin, her extroverted toddler, so she can work on her book—and it won’t be his father, Karl, since she just kicked him out of the house. He’s staying with his famous-artist sister, who took the revealing photo of Lady titled Woman No. 17. The other narrator is Lady’s new nanny, a recent college graduate whose real name is Esther Shapiro but who's going by S Fowler. Among the many things S does not reveal in her job interview is the fact that she's just begun a conceptual art project devoted to impersonating her mother as a young woman—even though her mother was and is an impulsive, unbalanced alcoholic. Lady and Esther have much in common (to the point that you sometimes forget which one you’re reading). Both had terrible mothers, both lie easily and often, and both are obsessed with Seth. These things draw them together less as friends than as self-involved dervishes on a collision course.

Always enjoyable if not always believable, this novel succeeds by staying light on its feet. Or, as one character puts it, “Please don’t monetize my bunny.”

Pub Date: May 9, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-101-90425-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TIME'S MOUTH
by Edan Lepucki

- BOOK REVIEW
CALIFORNIA
by Edan Lepucki

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Edan Lepucki

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

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Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.