A brisk and engaging novel that wears itself thin on the grindstone of its own conceit.
A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy.
Toward the end of 2019, GMB, a character with the author's initials, receives an email from one Martin Grey, who has in his possession several notebooks he believes GMB might find of interest. Mr. Grey asserts that the notebooks were written by his cousin about Collins Braithwaite, the notorious and now largely forgotten “enfant terrible of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s,” on whom GMB has recently published a blog post. According to Grey, the notebooks contain evidence of near-criminal misconduct concerning Braithwaite’s involvement in the suicide of the diarist’s older sister, Veronica. GMB’s research assures him of the notebooks’ authenticity, if not their veracity, and he presents their contents verbatim, interspersed with sections of his own outline of Braithwaite’s salacious life and ignoble death. From the plinth of this metatextual introduction, the book dives into the “kooky élan” of a thoroughly middle-class young woman—the diarist—as she infiltrates Braithwaite’s office under the nom de guerre Rebecca Smyth. Rebecca is bent on uncovering the truth about Braithwaite’s therapeutic practice though she’s unsure what purpose this truth would serve. However, over the course of the five notebooks, Rebecca’s rapid descent into true depression coupled with her increasing difficulty in keeping her original identity separate from her assumed self become the driving narrative. As the novel progresses, the author’s layering of his fictional characters’ unverifiable testimony, frank deception, and self-aggrandizing half-truths with significant historical figures of the time—like R.D. Laing and Dirk Bogarde—and GMB's omnipresent frame narrative overlap to the extent that it's hard to tell not just whose perception to trust, but which among all these counterfeit identities is real. As beguiling as Rebecca’s wry domestic critique can be, the book’s star is clearly the carefully constructed unreliability Burnet imbues at every level of his writing. This results in a novel that strives toward the biggest of questions—in the absence of the Cartesian ego Braithwaite seeks to slay, is there anything at all underneath our masks?—but lacks the character-driven empathy that would encourage us to care about the answer.
A brisk and engaging novel that wears itself thin on the grindstone of its own conceit.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77196-520-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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