Not Norman’s finest work but an intriguing attempt to complicate his usual concerns.
A man’s anguish over his wife’s murder—soon to be a major motion picture—blurs his grasp of reality in the latest moody, Halifax-set tale by Norman (What Is Left the Daughter, 2010; Devotion, 2007, etc.).
Sam Lattimore, the narrator of Norman’s eighth novel, is in mourning: As the story opens, it’s been almost a year and a half since his wife, Elizabeth, was killed by a bellman at the Halifax hotel where they lived. And while he has sensibly taken on a therapist to work through his grief, he less-than-sensibly insists that he often sees Elizabeth on a beach at night, putting piles of books in order. Sam grudgingly sold the rights to the tragedy to a director, but the filming is doing little to help him achieve closure, a word he can’t stand anyway. In brief, episodic chapters, Norman shuttles between Sam’s present-day processing and his memories of life with Elizabeth, particularly her obsession with the British author Marghanita Laski (1915-1988) and the increasingly unwelcome and threatening advances she endured by the bellman. The quirky, downbeat milieu is typical of Norman’s fiction, which balances an obsession with specific details about time and place with more high-flown musings on morality and love. Here, Norman is chiefly concerned with the subjectivity of history, which he explores in terms of Sam's remembrances of Elizabeth, his unshakable visions of her and the filmmaker’s rewriting of their lives. This high-concept stuff sometimes works at a low boil: Much of Sam’s narration comes in the context of his therapist appointments, which makes the reality-versus-fantasy debate feel too neatly framed, more discussed than described. But while that dampens the impact of Sam’s emotional unraveling, it’s a beguiling tale overall, a novel Paul Auster might write after a trip to Canada’s Eastern shore.
Not Norman’s finest work but an intriguing attempt to complicate his usual concerns.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-71212-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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