Long-time fans, especially those familiar with the Hand clan (previously introduced in Net of Jewels, 1992; I Cannot Get You Close Enough, 1990; The Anna Papers, 1988), will feel right at home with Gilchrist's latest meditation on love, sex, and family. Olivia de Haviland Hand, daughter of Daniel, a wealthy North Carolinian, decides to spend the summer after her freshman year in college with her maternal grandparents, who raised her. (Her mother, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, died in childbirth.) Olivia (Via) goes to Oklahoma and ends up reconnecting with her high school sweetheart, Bobby. When he asks her to marry him, she is forced to examine her feelings about love, sex, marriage, and motherhood. Via's 20-year-old half-sister, Jessie, is in New Orleans awaiting the birth of her first child by her cousin/husband, King, who is himself trying to grow quickly into responsible fatherhood. Via and Jessie's Aunt Helen (Daniel's sister) has left her husband and kids to pursue happiness in Boston with Irish poet Mike, whom she met after the suicide of her sister, Anna, fatally ill with cancer. Helen is trying to reconcile with her kids without giving up her new life, at the same time pressuring her brother Daniel to turn over a new leaf. Daniel, meanwhile, is languishing in Carolina deep in mid-life crisis, drinking the summer away, missing his daughters, ignoring his current lover, Margaret, until eventually he, too, sees the ``light'' of love and the possibility of a different future. Starcarbon is soap at its most elegant. Sex as life force comes through at every turn. Yet the novel's lyricism and Gilchrist's distinctive, flowing voice keeps one engaged throughout, even when the various storylines begin to lag in interest.
Pub Date: April 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-31327-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
IN THE NEWS
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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