Funny, bold, capacious, and more than a little exhausting—this book mirrors modern life.
The second novel by young Australian writer Lau is a maximalist caper set in the most achingly existential of modern locales: a suburban shopping mall.
Twenty-four-year-old Leen is adrift in her life. She and her mother settled in Par Mars, a suburb of carefully anonymizing subdivisions, when Leen was a child because they were attracted to “the tiredness of it, the bored unattractiveness of it, the lonely, antisocial nature of it, that made [them] both look inward.” Both her parents have since moved on, and Leen is left crashing somewhat indefinitely in her friend Doms’ living room, taking courses in massage therapy, and watching analysis videos of movies on her phone. With seed money from her peripatetic father and instruction from her mother—who has recently started a “healing business” in Hong Kong—Leen opens an ear-cleaning and massage studio in the Topic Heights shopping center, which sits in the center of the Par Mars suburb and represents “the exact summation of every need and personality of the people residing in its hem.” Though both Par Mars and Topic Heights strive to create the impression of regulation, order, and predictably scaled progress, there are signs that things are starting to come loose at the seams. Vic, Doms’ Nigerian boyfriend, is beaten in the street in a possibly racially motivated attack, and the rising unrest among the low-wage workers in Topic Heights is an expression of the growing social divide between people like Peggy—the CEO of the shopping complex, who facilitates drug-fueled swinger parties at her hilltop house on the coastal side of the estates—and people like Jean Paul, a nihilist pharmacy assistant who hosts social resistance meetings at the East Par Mars Community Center. As her business founders, Leen becomes increasingly involved with Jean Paul’s Resistance Acts—which begin as essentially harmless pranks against Topic Heights management but quickly escalate into psychological torment and then real bodily harm—even as she starts to doubt the purity of his proletariat motives. Lau’s second novel treads similar ground as Pink Mountain on Locust Island (2020), her debut take on Gen Z alienation, but with a hyperconscious maximalism that occasionally overwhelms the reader with the equity of its attention. There is so much to see in this novel that the reader is sometimes at a loss for where to look.
Funny, bold, capacious, and more than a little exhausting—this book mirrors modern life.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-662-60145-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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