The narrative is powerful and the characters compelling, when the writing doesn’t undermine the novelist’s considerable...
A sardonic novel that seethes with rage, yet lacks the stylistic command to fulfill its ambition.
The sophomore effort from Boice (MVP, 2007) has more power and narrative propulsion than his debut, but it suffers from some jarring shifts in tone. The title refers to northern Virginia, a suburban nowhere satellite of Washington, D.C., where fathers work for the military, mothers teach school or stay home, and teenagers fail to escape the numbness of their existence through getting stoned and having sex. “Starting at puberty, kids in Northern Virginia start going around muttering like a mantra that they hate Northern Virginia and can’t wait to leave,” writes Boice, though his novel leaves little hope that any of them will ever escape, and that even those who make a geographical departure will carry the disease of dead-end American consumerism with them. Meanwhile, most of their parents are leading empty lives in unsatisfying marriages, with some addicted to indiscriminate promiscuity and/or Internet porn. The novel begins on November 2, 1998, with the body of 17-year-old Grayson Donald hanging from a basketball rim. It ends on the same night, in the same place, returning full circle to the graphic details of Grayson’s death. The rest of the narrative shows what led Grayson to this fate, though he doesn’t seem appreciably more disturbed than the rest of his fellow high schoolers leading aimless lives or the parents who are clueless about the lives of their kids (and perhaps their own lives as well). As bleak as this novel may be, there are savagely funny episodes concerning random sex and one surrealistic orgy of serial vomiting. Yet the writing lacks a coherent narrative voice, one that wouldn’t mix dozens of words obscure or invented (“gungulation,” “meshanteries,” “fimetic,” all in the same paragraph) with lazy clichés (“brain fart,” “stinking drunk”).
The narrative is powerful and the characters compelling, when the writing doesn’t undermine the novelist’s considerable promise.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7542-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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