Overall, though, clever structure, swift pacing, emotional insight, and an ultimately charming voice make this one a...
A fine, smart, funny newcomer brings a bit of Bridget Jones, a touch of High Fidelity, a high pop-cultural IQ, and a refreshing emotional take to her debut outing.
Eliza Simon’s first crush, at age ten, was Jack Wagner, the airbrushed pop heartthrob to whom she devotes herself when her distant, jazz-buff father disappears from her life. At 26, her tastes have changed, but not that much. There’s been a string of “rock star” boyfriends, each dumped as soon as Eliza spots his fatal flaw: that he’s human, not the romantic, über-cool ideal she’d thought. A copywriter at a travel agency, Eliza hangs out at a local club, picks up musicians, watches Behind the Music and ’80s sitcoms, and brings tuna casserole and irony to monthly dinners with her family. She’s also working (or not working) on her book, a guide to dating rock stars, each chapter starting with a mix tape and telling the story of one of her boyfriends—the dark, brooding guitarist and laid-back sax-player of high school; the organic, communard, jam-band singer in college—the same stories as the novel now tells. Her book is the only thing Eliza doesn’t share with best friends, neither fast, funny Andrew (who, in a movie, she tells us, would turn out to be her true love) nor sweet, understanding, hippie-ish Hannah. Sister Camilla’s pregnancy and Hannah’s engagement jar Eliza into doing things differently, and she goes on a date with a securities analyst. Which, amusingly, is even worse than she’d feared. When that doesn’t change her life, she plunges into crisis (and flails about for an ending for her book), nicely resolved in a moving, genuine, growing-up moment. Much is overfamiliar here (snack cakes as a food group; the “perfect” sister; Eliza being wacky because she talks to her cat), and a multiply pierced 26-year-old bemoaning spinsterhood gives pause at this late date.
Overall, though, clever structure, swift pacing, emotional insight, and an ultimately charming voice make this one a standout.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-6467-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's...
A young woman with a knack for trick shooting heads west in the late 1800s to track down her outlaw brother.
Jessilyn Harney, the folksy narrator of Larison’s third novel (Holding Lies, 2011, etc.), has grown up watching her family lose its grip on its prairie homestead: Her mother died young, and her father is an alcoholic scraping by with small cattle herds. He’s also persistently at loggerheads with Jess' brother, Noah, who eventually runs off to, if the wanted posters are to be believed, lead a Jesse James–style criminal posse. So when dad dies as well, there’s nothing for teenage Jess to do but head west to find her brother, which she does disguised as a man. (“A man can be invisible when he wants to be.”) Her skill with a gun gets her in the good graces of a territorial governor (Larison is stingy with place names, but we’re near the Rockies), which ultimately leads to Noah and a series of revelations about the false tales of accomplishment that men cloak themselves with. Indeed, Jess’ success depends on repeatedly exploiting false masculine bravado: “I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm,” she writes. The novel’s plot is a familiar Western, with duels, raids, and betrayals, brought thematically up to date with a few scenes involving closeted sexuality and mixed-race relationships. But its main distinction is Jess’ narrative voice: flinty, compassionate, unschooled, but observant about a violent world where men “eat bullets and walk among ghosts.” The dialogue sometimes lapses into saloon-talk truisms (“Men is all the time hiding behind words”; “Being a boss is always knowing your true size”). But Jess herself is a remarkable hero.
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's voice is engaging and down-to-earth.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2044-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
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