A stylish, page-turning debut.
A masterfully told story of an old murder with a long reach moves seamlessly from the past to the present, from India to England, as a middle-aged Indian tries to learn the truth about his mother and a friend’s past.
Now based in England, the Indian-born Sinha (The Cybergypsies: A True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier, 1999) memorably evokes the contrasting textures of both societies in a first novel ostensibly about a true crime in 1950s Bombay—but in fact more about his protagonist’s own life. It’s 1998, and narrator Bhalu, a bookseller in Lewes, is summoned to London by his 76-year-old mother, Maya, who tells him she’s dying. In Bombay, Maya had been a noted storyteller and scriptwriter for the film industry; but as a young student, Bhalu was arrested in a police raid, and once Maya secured his release, sent him to England, shortly following there herself. Now, Maya, who believes that lives are continually unfolding and that stories never really end, claims she left India for Bhalu’s sake. Their leaving seems also strangely connected to the murder of one “Mr. Love,” a famous Bombay philanderer. Recalling his childhood in Bombay and the Amborna Hills, where he first met English Phoebe and her mother Sybil, a close friend of Maya’s, Bhalu also ruefully details his failures as a husband and as a filmmaker. Back in India he and Phoebe were close childhood friends who would explore the local countryside while Maya helped Sybil recover from an unspecified illness. Later, after Maya’s death, Bhalu learns real story about Sybil when Phoebe, unmarried and curiously elusive, contacts him suggesting that he read Sybil’s notebooks. From them he learns of Sybil’s affair with “Mr. Love,” her botched abortion, and the mysterious blackmailer who not only destroyed Sybil but also drove Maya and Bhalu to England. Returning to India to track down the blackmailer, Bhalu will finally understand both his own past, as well his mother’s and Sybil’s.
A stylish, page-turning debut.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056246-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Robinson has composed, with its cascading perfections of symbols, a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and...
The wait since 1981 and Housekeeping is over. Robinson returns with a second novel that, however quiet in tone and however delicate of step, will do no less than tell the story of America—and break your heart.
A reverend in tiny Gilead, Iowa, John Ames is 74, and his life is at its best—and at its end. Half a century ago, Ames’s first wife died in childbirth, followed by her new baby daughter, and Ames, seemingly destined to live alone, devoted himself to his town, church, and people—until the Pentecost Sunday when a young stranger named Lila walked into the church out of the rain and, from in back, listened to Ames’s sermon, then returned each Sunday after. The two married—Ames was 67—had a son, and life began all over again. But not for long. In the novel’s present (mid-1950s), Ames is suffering from the heart trouble that will soon bring his death. And so he embarks upon the writing of a long diary, or daily letter—the pages of Gilead—addressed to his seven-year-old son so he can read it when he’s grown and know not only about his absent father but his own history, family, and heritage. And what a letter it is! Not only is John Ames the most kind, observant, sensitive, and companionable of men to spend time with, but his story reaches back to his patriarchal Civil War great-grandfather, fiery preacher and abolitionist; comes up to his grandfather, also a reverend and in the War; to his father; and to his own life, spent in his father’s church. This long story of daily life in deep Middle America—addressed to an unknown and doubting future—is never in the slightest way parochial or small, but instead it evokes on the pulse the richest imaginable identifying truths of what America was.
Robinson has composed, with its cascading perfections of symbols, a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-15389-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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