An intriguing, ambitious literary work that will reward more patient readers.
Another complicated, multi-layered plot from English novelist McGregor (The Ice Child, 2001), this time concerning an upscale art appraiser obsessed with the work of a mad Victorian artist.
Catherine Sergeant left a promising position at Bergens in London some years ago when her usually dependable husband, Robert, took an accounting job in the countryside. Now working at a fancy auction house in Dorset, she feels baffled and betrayed by Robert’s sudden, inexplicable, but clearly intentional disappearance. A subtle, intelligent writer, McGregor is not satisfied with dwelling on the domestic crises of a newly abandoned wife. Catherine has entertained a fixation throughout her art career with Victorian painter Richard Dadd, an early genius who was incarcerated in mental asylums for 40 years after cutting his father’s throat with a penknife. Grieving over Robert, Catherine meets John Brigham, an eccentric, wealthy architect 20 years her senior who lives in a gorgeous Arts and Crafts cottage in the area. Grandson of the artist’s attendant at Bedlam insane asylum, John happens to know quite a bit about Dadd and even possesses a secret cache of his work. Startlingly, Catherine reminds the architect of a character in one of Dadd’s paintings. To further confound the rather contrived plot, John suffers from a mysterious, romantically fatal heart ailment, adding urgency to his affair with Catherine. The novel would disintegrate in less capable hands, but McGregor deliberately builds her narrative and manages to invest it with suspense by alternating between the contemporary story and grim glimpses inside Bedlam in the mid-19th century as Dadd paints his fanciful masterpieces. The author also offers just enough detail about chilly, callow Robert to attract and repel. Ultimately, however, the promise of John’s jealous, unstable sister, Helen, to reveal family skeletons stuffed in the closet (or, in this case, under the house’s floorboards) throws the story verily over the top.
An intriguing, ambitious literary work that will reward more patient readers.Pub Date: July 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80359-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
Originally published in German in 1962 and touted more recently as a feminist's Robinson Crusoe, this somber classic from prize-winner Haushofer chronicles the experiences of a (nameless) woman cut off from her familiar city ways in a remote hunting lodge, after Armageddon has snuffed out all life in the world beyond. With the woman's diary of activities during the first two years of isolation as foundation, the story assumes the shape and flavor of a journal. Saved from instant death by a transparent, apparently indestructible wall enclosing a substantial area of forest and alpine meadow, the woman finds relief from her isolation in companionship offered by a dog, a cat, kittens, and a cow and her calf, making them into a family that she cares for faithfully and frets over incessantly with each season's new challenges. Crops of potatoes, beans, and hay are harvested in sufficient quantity to keep all alive, with deer providing occasional meat for the table, but the satisfaction of having survived long winters and a halcyon summer is undone by a second sudden and equally devastating catastrophe, which triggers the need in her to tell her story. Although heavy with the repetition of daily chores, the account is also intensely introspective, probing as deeply into the psyche of the woman as it does into her world, which circumstances have placed in a new light. Subtly surreal, by turns claustrophobic and exhilarating, fixated with almost religious fervor on banal detail, this is a disturbing yet rewarding tale in which survival and femininity are strikingly merged. Not for macho readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-939416-53-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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