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AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE

An angry novel by Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety, 1993, etc.), offers a powerful, but incomplete, portrait of a young woman driving herself toward destruction. Narrator Carmel McBain traces her crabbed, anxious life from childhood in Lancashire up to college in London in the 1960's. Her parents are Irish immigrants, her father affable and distant, her mother furious, accusatory, manipulative. She relentlessly prods her daughter to succeed, and Carmel, intelligent and pliable, does: She wins a place in a posh convent school and eventually a scholarship to London. Meanwhile, Katrina, the stolid, bright, cruel daughter of a neighbor, shadows Carmel's life, always competing with her, following her first to the convent school and then to London. And Julia, Carmel's friend and roommate at the university, is elegant, insouciant, at 18 already juggling a series of well-heeled boyfriends. Mantel's portrait of these girls, and more generally of the lives of young women in the unsettled `60's, is sharp and convincing: Their brittle, witty talk, their struggle to fight for true careers, their difficulty navigating a new world of sexual possibilities, are all rendered here in vivid detail. And the self-hating Carmel's quiet descent into anorexia is traced with almost clinical exactitude. There's a much-foreshadowed climactic scene in which Carmel's dormitory burns down and Lysette, Katrina's roommate, dies. (Carmel suspects that the ever-envious and angry Katrina locked her in their room before fleeing.) Then, rather bafflingly, there's a perfunctory final chapter in which a much- older Carmel, cured of her anorexia and married, looks back on these events. We never learn how she came to grips with her furies, though, or even what has happened to the loathsome Katrina. It may be that Mantel wants to suggest that such things don't matter because so little has changed: Women are still without much true authority. Still, without some conclusive image, we're left guessing about the greater meanings behind this grim, profoundly moving work.

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8050-4427-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

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ERASURE

More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an...

Desperation outstrips the satire in Everett's latest exercise in narrative wizardry (Glyph, 1999, etc.), as a lonely African-American writer faces private torment and instant fame when his parody of ghetto literature is taken as the real deal.

His own generation's version of an invisible man, Thelonious Ellison, a.k.a. Monk, is a largely unknown academic novelist who visits hometown Washington, D.C., to give a paper and see his mother and sister. No sooner does he return to California than Sis, a doctor in an abortion clinic, is shot dead at work. Someone has to take care of Mom, who's showing the first wrenching signs of Alzheimer's, so Monk returns home. There, his frustration with a runaway bestseller written in ghettospeak by a bourgeois black woman after visiting Harlem for a couple of days is fueled by endless rejections of his own new manuscript; in a rage he pumps out a parody and sends it under a pseudonym to his agent—who promptly secures a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal. Stunned that no one recognizes his book as a send-up, Monk refuses to let his true identity be known. Meanwhile, he must cope with his mother's rapid decline, his gay brother's sudden animosity, and the discovery among his father's papers of letters indicating not only that Dad had a white mistress long ago, but that Monk has a half-sister his age. Struggling to maintain his own identity as his creation looms larger than life and his family redefines itself, he makes choices that render him invisible no more.

More genuine and tender than much of Everett's previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.

Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2001

ISBN: 1-58465-090-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001

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THE ROAD

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

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  • Pulitzer Prize Winner


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Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.

McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006

ISBN: 0-307-26543-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006

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