An ambitious, meticulously detailed story about modern Native American life, focusing on the struggle of a small, disenfranchised tribe in modern-day California to reclaim its heritage and identity. Sarris’s debut novel, like the tales in his collection, Grand Avenue (1994), is set in Santa Rosa, a small town on the California coast that’s been the home of the Waterplace Pomo since the tribe was forced off of its traditional lands. One of the many ironies at work here is that, while the local whites only guardedly accept the Pomos— presence, the town had in fact been founded by a Pomo (Rosa), who, more than a century before, gathered the remnants of the tribe together after it had been devastated by Mexican raiders. In present-day, it is Elba, an elderly woman, who has quietly labored to preserve Pomo traditions and the sense of tribal identity. Her 17-year-old grandson Johnny, who ekes out a living selling secondhand clothes, has become active in the battle to secure federal recognition for the Pomo so they can qualify for federal assistance—and even, perhaps, reclaim some of their land. Johnny’s mother, Elba’s daughter Iris, is furiously opposed to all of this, having spent her life trying to gain acceptance in white society. The story is narrated in turn by each of these three characters, allowing Sarris (himself the chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe in California) to illuminate the varied ways in which Native Americans have tried in modern times to deal with the tribal devastation they—ve undergone. Elba is the dominant figure here; her memories, both of her people’s past and traditions and of her own tragic past, are haunting. The resolution, in which the three family members and the varied (and vividly rendered) tribe members begin to draw together in the wake of violence, is both subtle and deeply moving. Despite a pace that sometimes dawdles, Sarris’s vigorous prose and robust characters make for a distinctive work, marking the debut of a singularly talented novelist. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6110-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.
After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways (including a short story written in Tweets), Pulitzer Prize winner Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010, etc.) does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel.
It shouldn’t really be surprising, since even Egan’s most experimental work has been rich in characters and firmly grounded in sharp observation of the society around them. Here, she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1673-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.
A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1.
It’s fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. Her address contains her last name, “Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent.” When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman’s (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author’s thematic concerns and style. Selin’s closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Selin’s first romantic entanglement—which begins via electronic mail—is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language—and languages—can and cannot do. This isn’t just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. She’s smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: “we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale—albeit without morphemes.” Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative, which feels more like a collection of connected microfictions than a traditional novel, but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did.
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-561-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
PROFILES
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