Blue Ashes ($13.00 paperback original;Oct.; 144 pp.; 1-55071-093-1): The volume that won Daoust the 1990 Governor General’s Award for poetry. A French-Canadian by birth, Daoust sets much of his poetry in the gay demimonde of Greenwich Village. The most sensational aspect of the collection is the long title poem, a recollection of a love affair between a six-year-old boy and a pedophiliac. Told from the perspective of the boy (—He was in his twenties / Beautiful as a statue in a church / I was an angel in the creche / The one who nods his head at each offering / He loved me like no one else / Ever would love me—), it is rather more mawkish than salacious, heavily weighed down by a romantic nostalgia that is too immature to be daring. The same can be said of most of the other works here, which tend to wither prematurely on the fragile vine of urban insularity (—At the Dean and Deluca cafÇ on Prince Street / Convoluted arabesques of conversation / Abstract paintings always trying to trap / Something concrete but different from what’s been said / Words wilt like flowers—) or drown in the deluge of homoerotic prurience (—A naked black beside me with hair dyed blond / Is patting Shanghai / His cock like a beached blue whale / Between the World Trade Building of his thighs—).
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55071-093-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
The heroine of Dave’s newest post-feminist chick-lit romance (The Divorce Party, 2008, etc.) must choose between the quiet life offered by her new husband and the fast lane her former lover represents.
Only days after 32-year-old Annie gets dumped by longtime live-in boyfriend Nick, an up-and-coming movie director, she meets Griffin at the chichi L.A. restaurant she frequents—talk about romantic fantasy: Annie’s career as a monthly travel columnist pays well, apparently demands little time or difficult travel and is never seriously endangered—and where he is temporarily the chef. It seems to be love at first sight, although Annie’s best friend Jordan, who also happens to be Nick’s sister, calls Griffin “Rebound Guy.” Three months after they meet, he proposes. They marry in a Vegas chapel on their way across the country to Griffin’s western Massachusetts hometown, where he is about to open his own restaurant—Annie’s job with a New York paper also allows her to live anywhere. But Williamsburg requires a lot of adjusting on Annie’s part. Griffin’s genius brother Jesse and his 5-year-old twins move in with the newlyweds because Jesse’s wife has thrown him out for impregnating the MIT professor guiding his doctorate program. The twin’s art teacher turns out to be Gia, until recently Griffin’s girlfriend of 13 years, whom Griffin’s mother makes clear she’d much prefer as a daughter-in-law. Then Nick shows up from his new base in London to win Annie back; she turns him down, but she feels stirrings. When the new Rupert Murdocklike owner of her paper offers her a job in London, Griffin encourages her to try it out. Soon she’s settled in London in a fantastic apartment, the company is grooming her for a new dream job, the publisher’s dashing son is wooing her and Nick is just a call away. What’s a girl to do? A lightweight romance posing as something realistic and psychologically profound.
Pub Date: May 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02267-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
Lightman, a teacher of physics and writing at MIT, evokes the musings of Albert Einstein in this playful, unusual first work of fiction. It is six in the morning, and a sleepy young Einstein slumps at his desk in the patent office, dreaming of the nature of time. Time has been on Einstein's mind a lot lately, and he's become adept at envisioning each of many theories in concrete, three- dimensional form. While Einstein sleeps, Lightman takes the reader through the young genius's imagined worlds, evoking cities in which time is cyclical and citizens are doomed to repeat their triumphs and mistakes eternally; in which people routinely get caught in wandering tributaries of time and are washed back into the past; in which time is believed to flow more slowly at higher altitudes so that all humans, in order to live longer, build their houses on mountaintops; in which there is no connection between cause and effect and people live a carefree existence in each separate moment, and in which it is possible to stop time and live forever within a favorite instant. Occasionally, Einstein wakes up, goes home, dines with a friend, or stares blankly off into the distance, but the focus here is not on his personal life. Instead, with these brief, light vignettes, Lightman offers a glimpse into strange theoretical kingdoms—and also lets the reader in on the workings of a creative scientific mind. Cheerful fantasies, balanced exquisitely between poetry and the popular physics essay. (First serial to Granta and Harper's.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41646-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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