Lively but familiar, despite the lunge for the exotic.
Hower’s sixth (Shadows and Elephants, 2001, etc.) continues his exploration of Asia, this time in the story of a Sri Lankan girl’s complicated coming of age.
Destined to become a talented painter, young Lila is growing up in a jungle nature preserve managed by her parents. She hopes to be shepherded to adulthood by mysterious Uncle Richard, who arrives in the small town of Kudawa at a time of violence and upheaval. It’s the Buddhists against the Hindus, with Christians like Lila and her family among the innocent bystanders to the whole mess. Cultural conflict creates some of the tension: Sri Lanka is haunted by devas, “little goddesses that protect trees and rivers,” but Richard tells tales of Sprite, which in the US is both a sweet drink and another name for devas. Lila herself might be a preta, a soul caught in Sri Lankan limbo, “stuck between incarnations. She was aching for her old familiar life . . . but at the same time longing for everything to change.” Lila and Richard have an uncommon bond; from her sketches, she knows what he means when he says that he sometimes doesn’t know his thoughts until he writes them down. Apart from their talks together, most of the story centers on Lila’s cat Zalie, who is first imprisoned for doing something wrong, then possessed, then sacrificed to either set it free or send a message. The cat serves as a metaphorical echo of the Tamil Tiger terrorists, who may be using the nature preserve to hide from enemies. To what extent Lila’s father is mixed up in the hostilities carries the plot from there. We’re stuck in Lila’s point of view, so most of the intrigue remains at a distance, and this remains a standard Bildungsroman, flavored with some foreign mysticism and a dash or two of demons.
Lively but familiar, despite the lunge for the exotic.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-86538-106-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive...
This touching chronicle of love and pain traces half a century in a family of five from the parents’ engagement in 1963 through a father’s and son’s psychological torments and a final crisis.
Something has happened to Michael in the opening pages, which are told in the voice of his brother, Alec. The next chapter is narrated by Margaret, the mother of Michael, 12, Celia, 10, and Alec, 7, and the wife of John, as they prepare for a vacation in Maine. Soon, a flashback reveals that shortly before John and Margaret were to wed, she learned of his periodic mental illness, a “sort of hibernation” in which “the mind closes down.” She marries him anyway and comes to worry about the recurrence of his hibernations—which exacerbate their constant money problems—only to witness Michael bearing the awful legacy. Each chapter is told by one of the family’s five voices, shifting the point of view on shared troubles, showing how they grow away from one another without losing touch, how they cope with the loss of John and the challenge of Michael. Haslett (Union Atlantic, 2009, etc.) shapes these characters with such sympathy, detail, and skill that reading about them is akin to living among them. The portrait of Michael stands out: a clever, winning youth who becomes a kind of scholar of contemporary music with an empathy for black history and a wretched dependence on Klonopin and many other drugs to keep his anxiety at bay, to glimpse a “world unfettered by dread.”
As vivid and moving as the novel is, it’s not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he’s so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-26135-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.
A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe.
Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she’d been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl’s project to “neutralize botanical toxins,” to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell’s mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build “a poison that undoes itself.” Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. “As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan,” Nell writes. “What isn’t for you?” The rest of Nell’s world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan’s husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls—less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought—and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan’s presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell’s ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line—mostly successfully—between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book’s final third.
Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7737-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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