Highly satisfying on many levels, this novel will have book clubs basking in its big symbols and abuzz over Tamara’s final...
Grounded by fog during a layover, a woman heading to New York recalls growing up in wartime England and the lover she has just left in Ireland in this thoughtful, multifaceted work.
In her ninth novel, the Canadian writer (Sanctuary Line, 2010, etc.) again taps her family’s Irish background. Tamara is one of a group of female pilots who ferry fighter planes around England during World War II. She then flees an unhappy marriage to settle with childhood friend Teddy in Ireland. A few years after his drowning death, she begins an affair with married Niall, a meteorologist whose County Kerry family is darkened by his mother’s suicide and the subsequent psychotic tantrums of his brother, Kieran. The unsatisfying relationship, full of long waits for short trysts, drives her to flee Niall for the U.S., when the clearly symbolic fog—see also the Eugene O’Neill epigraph from “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”—delays the flight in Gander, Newfoundland, and lets her ponder her life and the waiting room’s mural by real-life Canadian painter Kenneth Lochhead called “Flight and Its Allegories.” The novel essentially begins in that waiting room and then expands in parallel narratives about the painter and the brother while constantly returning to this former pilot, who wonders: “How could she, one of those previously forceful birds, find herself so essentially adrift?” Urquhart—whose prose at times flows from the same hand that has written four volumes of poetry—reveals her characters slowly, placing them within or privy to smaller narratives, vignettes, anecdotes that are themselves small marvels of storytelling and serve the several themes of love’s pain, family turmoil, and the elusive sense of home and place, especially in light of Ireland’s immigrant history. The Kieran narrative almost overwhelms with its powerful mix of sibling rivalry, Irish mysticism, and the passion of a first love. Yet ultimately, with Urquhart’s masterful hand, it fits well among the novel’s resonant whole.
Highly satisfying on many levels, this novel will have book clubs basking in its big symbols and abuzz over Tamara’s final decision; for when the fog lifts, there are two planes outside: one to New York and one to Shannon.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22219-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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