Though the wild, wounded rant of the opening story seems promising, by the time we get to the mental patient and the...
Monologues in the voices of six guests, plus the mother of the bride, at a wedding in Atlanta.
"There is no justice in this world, and you can start with the simple fact that some people look like Elizabeth Gottlieb," announces Carla Leftkowitz at the opening of the first story in Weisman's fiction debut, set at Elizabeth's wedding among the Jewish elite. The beauty of her lifelong friend, whom she now serves as bridesmaid, is particularly enervating because Carla has a port-wine birthmark covering half her left cheek. Author Weisman's background as a dermatologist adds texture to Carla's furious ruminations on physical beauty, as she passes her time imagining her 17 sister bridesmaids with "double chins, saggy breasts, twenty unlosable pounds around the middle, disappointment creased into their foreheads," yet she also dreams of a time "when we evolve to see the beauty in the stroked-out and the misshapen, the one-eyed and the cleft-lipped, the swollen and the stained." In the next story we hear from a character even more bitter than Carla: Elizabeth's grandfather Albert, a powerful, repellent man now mute and confined to a wheelchair after a stroke. Next up...a close family friend, who's attending with her nasty husband and also-wheelchair-bound son, the latter having been Elizabeth's charge when she worked as a teenager at a summer camp for the disabled. There are just a few tendrils of backstory to tie the characters together and virtually no plot development in the present tense of the wedding, so these long forays into the unhappy characters' inner lives have to hold the reader's attention on their own.
Though the wild, wounded rant of the opening story seems promising, by the time we get to the mental patient and the Holocaust survivor who wander (separately) off into the woods, the reader, too, is ready to leave.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-79329-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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