Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades.
A grievous unhappiness rakes across this novel about the slow self-destruction of the isolated Nowak family.
Wang’s debut begins with a suicidal David Nowak’s reminiscences of his mid-20th-century childhood, which raises ghosts of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, both in style and in the self-flagellating obsessions of a neurotic boy. He spends his Brooklyn youth deep in a self-hatred from which he is occasionally rescued by his fixation on a neighbor girl, the lovely and innocent Marianne. When his father’s sudden death leads to the hapless David’s decision to sell the piano company he has inherited, Marianne abandons him under the pressure of her family’s disdain, and so begins the series of events that becomes the death-seeking spiral that forms this novel. Not yet 20, David aimlessly lets his wealth take him to Taiwan, where he meets a bold bar girl named Jia-Hui Chen, whose “sappy, sloppy girlishness” makes his “nerves squirm with delight.” David and the girl he renames Daisy alternate telling the story of the early years of their marriage, "hemorrhaging money" in California. Daisy’s voice is brash and matter-of-fact, a welcome relief from David’s morose, confessional detailing of his progressive madness. Eventually they hole up in a valley in the Sierras, “a place of brambling woods and mining shafts.” Penned in first by David’s aloofness and then by Daisy’s growing paranoia, the Nowaks’ world shrinks and becomes increasingly eccentric. When their overly obedient teenage son William picks up the narrative, his voice is an exact echo of his father’s. So is his obsessive love for pubescent girls. Wang's deeply uncomfortable and somber novel is soaked with bizarre details, yet only in its final movements does the pace shift from static and entrapping to horrifically propulsive as the distant hope of escape glimmers. More focused on psychology than plot, Wang's novel remains extraordinarily unresolved, with sudden brutalities that send the story haring toward an unexpected, abrupt ending.
Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-69-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.
When Chi Chi Donatelli gave famous crooner Saverio Armandonada a manicure on a 1930s New Jersey beach, little did she know that the swanky singer would change her life.
After his childhood sweetheart married another man, Saverio left the security of his job on the factory line in Detroit, earning his father’s disapproval but opening wide the door to success as a big-band singer. Along his way to stardom, Saverio changed his name to Tony Arma and discovered a talent for romancing—but never marrying—the ladies. But once he meets Chi Chi, his bachelor days are numbered. From a large, boisterous Italian family, Chi Chi is eager to have a life like Tony’s, with the freedom to sing and travel the country. She wants no part of marriage with its shackles. Soon Chi Chi and Tony are touring together, eventually developing a profitable shtick, with Chi Chi writing bestselling songs and Tony serenading them to dreamy audiences. It’s only a matter of time before Tony proposes. After all, unlike his other girls, Chi Chi offers Tony not only beauty and charm, but also the stability of a home. The lovers’ work in the entertainment industry gives way to a marriage blessed with babies yet held apart by war. Once reunited, Chi Chi’s independence and Tony’s philandering further fracture their marriage. But as Tony’s path wends from woman to woman, Chi Chi forges a new life on her own terms. A mistress of the sweeping family saga, bestselling author Trigiani (Kiss Carlo, 2017, etc.) sets Chi Chi and Tony’s lifelong love affair against the grand stage of World War II through the postwar boom years and the women’s liberation movement, tracing a society catching up with Chi Chi’s determination to control her own financial and personal freedom.
A heartfelt tale of love too stubborn to surrender to human frailties.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-231925-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.
A Russian refugee’s terrible secret overshadows her family life.
Meredith, heir apparent to her family’s thriving Washington State apple enterprises, and Nina, a globetrotting photojournalist, grew up feeling marginalized by their mother. Anya saw her daughters as merely incidental to her grateful love for their father Evan, who rescued her from a German prison camp. The girls know neither their mother’s true age, nor the answers to several other mysteries: her color-blindness, her habit of hoarding food despite the family’s prosperity and the significance of her “winter garden” with its odd Cyrillic-inscribed columns. The only thawing in Anya’s mien occurs when she relates a fairy tale about a peasant girl who meets a prince and their struggles to live happily ever after during the reign of a tyrannical Black Knight. After Evan dies, the family comes unraveled: Anya shows signs of dementia; Nina and Meredith feud over whether to move Mom from her beloved dacha-style home, named Belye Nochi after the summer “white nights” of her native Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Anya, now elderly but of preternaturally youthful appearance—her white hair has been that way as long as the girls can remember—keeps babbling about leather belts boiled for soup, furniture broken up for firewood and other oddities. Prompted by her daughters’ snooping and a few vodka-driven dinners, she grudgingly divulges her story. She is not Anya, but Vera, sole survivor of a Russian family; her father, grandmother, mother, sister, husband and two children were all lost either to Stalin’s terror or during the German army’s siege of Leningrad. Anya’s chronicle of the 900-day siege, during which more than half a million civilians perished from hunger and cold, imparts new gravitas to the novel, easily overwhelming her daughters’ more conventional “issues.” The effect, however, is all but vitiated by a manipulative and contrived ending.
Bestselling Hannah (True Colors, 2009, etc.) sabotages a worthy effort with an overly neat resolution.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-36412-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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