A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.
Two lovers seemingly meant for each other plunge into a hellfire of contention, recrimination, and grief in Eberstadt’s unsparing fourth novel (after When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, 1997).
She’s overachieving Gwen Lewis, who works for a privately funded human rights organization offering redevelopment aid throughout the former Soviet Union. He’s Gideon Wolkowitz, an anarchic puppeteer and street theater performer whose merry band (Pants on Fire) is devoted to sabotaging NYC Mayor Giuliani’s policy of selling publicly owned buildings to corporations. Accidentally meeting both at home and abroad, Gwen and Gideon instantly, ecstatically connect: their mutual sexual hunger recognizes no boundaries, and when Gwen finds herself unexpectedly, inconveniently pregnant, they bravely rearrange priorities, and marry. Then the furies begin to descend. In a densely allusive, insistently metaphoric prose style (somewhat akin to Hortense Calisher’s), Eberstadt brilliantly employs a form of hectoring direct address to both her protagonists, concentrating with—well, furious intensity on Gwen’s panicky realization that the imperatives of childrearing may forever estrange her from her chosen life, and on Gideon’s constant need (shaped by a loveless itinerant childhood and youth) for validation and security. He loses himself in “work” scorned by Gwen’s upscale family and friends. She doggedly juggles care of infant daughter Bella with the career that’s slowly slipping away from her. Both parents are caught in “the trap of love-gone-wrong: you withdraw your love, and your lover, feeling unloved, acts only the more unlovable . . . . ” The noose never relaxes: a horrific shock climax seems to promise the freedom each demands of the other, but brings only further compromise and captivity. This essentially unoriginal plot gains great depth from two exhaustively penetrating characterizations and from Eberstadt’s virtual genius for ironically precise summary statement (“The earth is the Lord’s, but the abominations that you commit on it are your own,” etc.).
A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41256-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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