A rewarding, if somewhat overlong, novel about unexpected family ties and the pain of mental illness.
A New York interior designer has a close but tumultuous relationship with his mother’s cousin, a bipolar sculptor, in Bergman’s (Small Ironies, 2011, etc.) novel.
Billy Duncan has already achieved great success at the age of 26. He’s a sought-after interior designer who’s currently renovating a Greenwich Village townhouse for an affluent client. Out of the blue, his mother asks him to meet her cousin Feyhe, a woman 30 years his senior whom he’s never met. He’s seen a few photographs of her, though, and the family describes her as “a legend, a myth, a semi-saga, really.” She’s a highly regarded sculptor who reigns over her dinner parties like an empress. As a fellow artist, Billy is drawn to her, but it turns out that Feyhe is volatile, unpredictable, and prone to fits of temper; it soon becomes clear that she suffers from bipolar disorder. Billy feels indebted to her because she’s family and because of client referrals, but dealing with her intense moods proves difficult. Meanwhile, Billy becomes romantically involved with named Joe, but he’s a vice cop—a risky choice of lover, particularly in 1970s New York. Nevertheless, their relationship blossoms and they move in together. Feyhe secures a commission for a feminist sculpture in Korea that falls under local government suspicion; she then arranges to move her Korean friends, the Kim family, to the United States. Bergman’s weighty novel is often compelling, and it works best when he is describing how Feyhe can be both a force of nature and a gradually unfolding tragedy, particularly as her mental health deteriorates. Bergman describes the character’s ups and downs in a series of stories that can be as piquant as they are harrowing. Billy handily represents the wonder and the cynicism of life in Manhattan through the years; however, if he’s intended to suffer from bipolar disorder, as well, it’s never fully fleshed out. The novel is too slow-paced, overall, but its portrayal of complex, unique relationships is impressive.
A rewarding, if somewhat overlong, novel about unexpected family ties and the pain of mental illness.Pub Date: May 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5422-0000-4
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Silver Street Media
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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