Thoughtful but awkwardly written debut about a young woman's emotional awakening. The doleful tone, unfortunately, is...
A frustrated cook leads a flavorless life—until she leaves her husband.
Anna Rossi loved Michael once, when he was a brilliant student and great kisser. But that was before he became a stuffed-shirt lawyer with friends and colleagues who always ask her if she majored in home ec. She's tired of being patronized and weary of her loveless marriage, but her daughter Sara is only six, too young to handle the stress of a divorce. When Anna talks Michael into a vacation at a New Hampshire inn, hoping for a reconciliation, the two discover, not surprisingly, that there really isn't anything left to say. Anna stays on to work in the kitchen, keeping Sara with her while Michael reluctantly returns to Chicago. She soon strikes up a friendship with James, the inn's sous-chef and a man who knows his way around a mushroom. His knack for fine cooking and his sensual good looks impress Anna, and it's not long before the two become lovers, though Michael continues besieging his wife with eloquent letters, wondering where they went wrong and answering his own questions all in one breath. Anna broods in silence and doesn't reply as she contemplates her failed marriage and compares it to that of her unhappy parents, throwing in, for good measure, every wrong turn she ever took and the least slight she ever suffered. Her mother's sudden stroke and subsequent disability compel Anna to make the most of her life while she's still young enough to enjoy it, and so the agonizing process of divorce begins, though it's instigated by the understandably jealous Michael. In due time, he and Anna part ways forever, and she begins her life anew, doing what she loves at last.
Thoughtful but awkwardly written debut about a young woman's emotional awakening. The doleful tone, unfortunately, is unrelenting.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87754-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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