A solitary art historian reflects on the men and women he’s loved in McKenzie’s melancholy debut novel.
Forty-two-year-old Alan Orr walks the streets of Florence, Italy, immersed in the beauty of the city and nostalgia for his youth. His reminiscences mostly focus on Martin, an affectionate friend from his boarding school days, and Lauren, a married woman with whom Alan had an affair as part of her open marriage in the late 1970s. The nostalgia is sweet and somber, set against Florence’s enchanting piazzas, and the novel is full of Alan’s vivid observations, whether he’s describing a sexual encounter with Luca, a young prostitute, or eavesdropping on tourists’ conversations in a hotel lobby. After he returns home to San Francisco, he dines with his friend Matt, a composer who lives a solitary, work-focused life, not unlike Alan’s. Eventually, Matt introduces Alan to Nick, a younger man he’s fond of, and Alan comes to develop a liking for him as well. Alan fills his days with writing and walks and often exchanges affection and pleasantries with the male dancers at the Polk Street Theatre, who provide Alan “a holiday from himself.” Yet not even these intimacies can rescue Alan from a descent into depression, as his walks grow longer and his mind grows more unfocused. The novel sags when Alan goes into therapy, which allows for navel-gazing and elaboration of his back story, which includes an abusive father and a mother with a pill habit. In order to shake things up, Alan invites Nick on a return trip to Florence, only to find out that the company he most enjoys is his own. As time wears on, he gets the opportunity to reunite with both Martin and Lauren, leading to lifelike, if anticlimactic, closure. The narration slips between past and present events, which may sometimes leave readers lost. However, its poetic turns of phrase elevate Alan’s story from a morass of depression to an evocative stroll through the nostalgia of middle age. Florence, for example, is described as “a large, heady display of the human soul.” McKenzie expertly draws the secondary characters that Alan meets along the way, and their charisma and energy serve to balance Alan’s pensive moods. The settings are characters in themselves, and the colorful neighborhoods and streets of Florence, San Francisco and Boston help anchor Alan’s introspective story in strong senses of place.
A carefully crafted meditation on disappointment that includes many scenes of beauty worth savoring.
Pub Date: May 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495444449
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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