Intelligent, challenging and exciting.
Two cousins linked by a shameful secret, a convicted murderer and a reformed meth freak are unlikely co-conspirators in this adventurous new novel by Egan (Look at Me, 2001, etc.).
Aging party boy Danny is uneasy at the castle recently purchased by his cousin Howie in a remote area of central Europe. True, a “misunderstanding” with some very tough customers made it imperative to get out of New York City, and his cousin sent him a ticket. But has Howie really forgiven Danny for abandoning him in an underground cave when they were teenagers, a trauma that led him to drugs and crime? Well, maybe, since Howie eventually became a bond trader rich enough to retire at 34 and dream of turning the castle into a unique kind of hotel. “Let people be tourists of their own imaginations,” he says, explaining that the castle will be free of all electronic distractions. Danny, who panics without his cell phone and Internet connection, is incredulous; when Howie says, “Imagination! It saved my life,” his guilty cousin is sure he’s making reference to that fateful day in the cave. No sooner are we immersed in this intriguing setup than the author pulls back to reveal that it’s the creation of Ray, who’s taking a writing course to kill time in jail. This storytelling strategy is hard to pull off, since one tale is almost always more interesting than the other, but Egan’s characterizations and plotting are so strong that we’re eager to find out where both sets of protagonists are heading even before it becomes clear that Ray is describing something that actually happened to him. As the focus shifts once again, this time to Ray’s teacher Holly, all the narrative strands come together to underscore the theme Egan movingly delineates throughout: the power of art to transform even the most twisted and hopeless lives. There are a few slow spots, and the beautiful prose doesn’t entirely disguise how wildly improbable the novel’s events are, but the characters’ emotions are so real, the author’s insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away.
Intelligent, challenging and exciting.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4392-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Upon finishing, readers might be tempted to start again, not wanting to let it go.
An exquisitely crafted debut novel—subtle, shimmering and emotionally devastating.
Those whose memories of contemporary literature extend a quarter century might be tempted to compare this with Susan Minot’s Monkeys (1986), another short, elliptical debut novel about family dynamics that received rapturous reviews upon publication. Yet this is a different novel, and a better one, about a different sort of family and a narrator’s discovery of how he is both a part of them and apart from them. The dedication—“For my mother, my brothers and my father and for Owen”—suggests that the narrator’s rites of passage reflect the author’s own, that this is a novel that probes deep, even painful truths. The narrator is the youngest of three sons of a white, Brooklyn mother and a Puerto Rican father, who became parents in their teens. Like the title suggests, the first-person narration initially might as well be plural, for the narrator and his older brothers Manny and Leon resemble “a three-torsoed beast,” scrounging for sustenance and meaning amid the tumultuous relationship of their parents, one that the boys can barely understand (though sometimes they intuit more than the narrator can articulate). Their bond provides what little defense they have against their mother’s emotional instability and their father’s unsteady employment and fidelity. They are, like some of the most exhilarating writing, “wild and loose and free.” Yet the narrative voice is a marvel of control—one that reflects the perceptions and limitations of a 7-year-old in language that suggests someone older is channeling his younger perspective. In short chapters that stand alone yet ultimately achieve momentum, the narrator comes to terms with his brothers, his family and his sexuality, separating the “I” from the “we” and suffering the consequences. Ultimately, the novel has a redemptive resonance—for the narrator, for the rest of the fictional family and for the reader as well.
Upon finishing, readers might be tempted to start again, not wanting to let it go.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-57672-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Very dark and very scary, with no simple answers provided—fantasy for grown-ups, in other words, and very satisfying indeed.
Grossman (Codex, 2004, etc.) imagines a sorcery school whose primary lesson seems to be that bending the world to your will isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
When Quentin manages to find Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy and pass its baffling entrance exam, he finally feels at home somewhere. Back in the real world, Quentin and fellow students, like brilliant, crippling shy Alice and debonair, sexually twisted Eliot, were misfits, obsessed with a famous children’s series called Fillory and Further (The Chronicles of Narnia, very lightly disguised). Brakebills teaches them how to tap into the universe’s flow of energy to cast spells; they’re ready to graduate and…then what? “You can do nothing or anything or everything,” cautions Alice, who has become Quentin’s lover. “You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails.” Her warning seems apt as he indulges in aimless post-grad drinking and partying, eventually betraying Alice with two other Brakebills alums. The discovery that Fillory actually exists offers Quentin a chance to redeem himself with Alice and find a purpose for his life as well. But Fillory turns out to be an even more dangerous, anarchic place than the books suggested, and it harbors a Beast who’s already made a catastrophic appearance at Brakebills. The novel’s climax includes some spectacular magical battles to complement the complex emotional entanglements Grossman has deftly sketched in earlier chapters. The bottom line has nothing to do with magic at all: “There’s no getting away from yourself,” Quentin realizes. After a dreadful loss that he discovers is the result of manipulation by forces that care nothing about him or his friends, Quentin chooses a bleak, circumscribed existence in the nonmagical world. Three of his Brakebills pals return to invite him back to Fillory: Does this promise new hope, or threaten more delusions?
Very dark and very scary, with no simple answers provided—fantasy for grown-ups, in other words, and very satisfying indeed.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02055-3
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
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