A bravura encore worth the wait.
German-Jewish couple escape the Holocaust but not their accursed heritage.
After a 35-year hiatus from fiction (she authored a popular cookbook series, Kitchen Wisdom, etc.), Arkin (The Dorp, 1969) has crafted a small gem of a second novel. Hedwig and Berti, married first cousins, flee to Britain just before their blue-blooded Berlin family is decimated by the Nazi genocide. The two descend on their cousin Harry in his small London flat. Hedwig, a statuesque blonde Valkyrie type, is in denial about what is going on in her homeland. Berti, a diminutive self-effacing guy, just wants to take care of small animals as a veterinary assistant, despite overtures from his boss’s wife. Hedwig gives birth to Gerda, an odd-looking child who’s taken at first for a changeling. Preternaturally attuned to sound, Gerda claws her way to piano lessons, a master teacher, and a concert career. The couple’s odyssey continues to the US, where Berti finally finds love and respect as a night clerk in a Kansas bordello, and Hedwig becomes the domestic hausfrau goddess of a frat house. Scandal scuttles Gerda’s performing career after she punishes a recalcitrant pupil in a way that would do the character in Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher proud. Gerda joins her parents in the US but can’t shake the self-hatred that stiffens her fingers and drives away would-be mentors. Hedwig’s older brother, Bruno, her reluctant host in America, was exiled years before after his mother died under mysterious circumstances (poisoned?), followed by his father (suicide?), leaving Hedwig to be raised by her imperious health-nut grandfather, the wealthy owner of a wurst factory. Bruno’s airing of dark family secrets staunches Gerda’s pain, but only until her mother’s more shocking confession reopens the wound. Arkin depicts these damaged characters, and their territorial and emotional displacement, with unflinching honesty and rueful insight. The language, as pitch-perfect as Gerda’s ear, shifts seamlessly from British to American to German-accented ESL.
A bravura encore worth the wait.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33354-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
A dark, quick-moving, suspenseful story stuffed full of psychological quirk and involution.
The latest thriller from Swanson (All the Beautiful Lies, 2018, etc.) is a twisty, fast-paced tale that depicts picket-fence suburbia's seamy, murderous underside.
Hen and her husband, Lloyd, have just left Boston for the tranquil burbs, and things are looking up for her. After a psychotic break sparked by the unsolved murder of a neighbor, Hen is on the mend, her bipolar disorder under control, her optimism resurgent, her career as an illustrator of dark YA books taking off. At a meet and greet she and her husband hit it off, or think they should, with their next-door neighbors Matthew and Mira, the only other childless couple nearby. But when they cross the driveway for a barbecue, the potential for neighborly coziness curdles. Hen notices a little fencing trophy on a shelf in Matthew's office and recognizes it—or wonders if she recognizes it—as one of the mementos the police reported was stolen from the murder scene in the city. When Hen recalls that the man killed was once a student at the prep school where Matthew teaches history, Hen grows suspicious of Matthew—and starts to stalk him. Is this a break in the case or the beginning of another fit of paranoia? And even if it's the former, who will believe Hen's suspicions given her earlier obsession with the case and the hospitalization it led to? Swanson is at his best in exploring the kinship—or what some see as the kinship—between artist and killer, one of the themes of Swanson's great model and forebear, Patricia Highsmith. Swanson isn't quite up to Highsmith's lofty mark, and he succumbs toward the end to a soap opera–like plot-twist-too-far...but for the most part, this novel delivers.
A dark, quick-moving, suspenseful story stuffed full of psychological quirk and involution.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283815-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Harmless, obvious, and about as full of surprises as a timetable.
A long-haul potboiler from the indefatigable Baldacci (Wish You Well, 2000, etc.) introduces a hardcase reporter to America and wins him his true love.
The decision to make an overnight train trip often begins with a good idea (scenery or nostalgia, say) that doesn’t survive the rigors of the journey. Tom Langdon is an exception in that he takes Amtrak from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles out of sheer necessity: The airlines have banned him from all commercial flights for assaulting an insolent metal-detector guard. That should give you a good insight into Tom’s character right there—for the rest, all you need to know is that he’s a divorced freelance journalist who is dating a Hollywood voiceover actress. Since Tom is due to spend Christmas in LA with his girlfriend, he decides to make a virtue of necessity by writing an article about train travel in the US, so he books a private compartment on the Capitol Limited and heads for Washington’s Union Station one snowy December night. His fellow passengers are a mix of flesh: There’s Agnes Joe (a large and overbearing former trapeze artist), Father Paul Kelly (a retired priest), Julie and Steve (an engaged couple who decide to get married on the train—literally), Gordon Merryweather (a sleazo lawyer who calls himself the “king of the class-action lawsuit), and a mysterious group from Hollywood who board secretly to avoid publicity. Tom wanders about the train, innocent and relatively carefree, until he discovers that the woman at the center of the Hollywood group is the famous screenwriter Eleanor Carter—his ex-wife! Even more amazing, Eleanor’s director Max Powers finds out that Tom is a writer and convinces Eleanor to collaborate on a project with him. It looks like Tom’s career is taking off after all. But will he be able to work with Eleanor now that they’re on a purely platonic level? Probably not—but who said they had to do it that way?
Harmless, obvious, and about as full of surprises as a timetable.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-52573-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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