Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid.
A sense of longing suffuses Tseng’s sexy, sad debut novel about a 41-year-old librarian who embarks on an affair with a shy, handsome high school student.
Readers of literary fiction might be turned off by the premise of award-winning poet Tseng’s (Red Flower, White Flower, 2013, etc.) debut novel, which sounds suspiciously like a bodice-ripper: Mayumi, a librarian living on an island off the New England coast that empties in the offseason—emotionally marooned in a loveless marriage, clinging for warmth to her 4-year-old daughter, and drifting toward middle age—finds unlikely, forbidden love and gasp-inducing passion in the arms of an alluring 17-year-old just leaving the safe harbor of his boyhood. Aware of the dangers and abashed at the Nabokov-ian overtones, Mayumi nevertheless handily introduces the young man, whom she never names, to the pleasures of sex and literature. He buoys her with his youth and beauty, saving her from sinking deeper into isolation. And then there’s the young man’s mother, to whom Mayumi also finds herself drawn and with whom she forges a relationship. The slow, inevitable tectonic intersection of these three lives leads, ultimately, to calamity, though not in the way you might predict. Yet, in other regards, the interconnection also holds the key to their survival, providing pockets of pure joy that keep them afloat amid despair. So, sure, this does at times read like a romance with particular middle-aged–mom appeal; its love scenes don’t lack for erotic description and detail, and Mayumi’s obsessive admiration for the young man swings between coolly perceptive and discomfitingly overheated. But the precision and poetry of Tseng’s writing keep the book from meandering too far in that direction, and the emotional and physical landscapes she conjures—the snow-covered vistas, cozy hidden cottages, and jewellike spring-fed ponds—make it worth the visit.
Tseng explores time and place, isolation and connection, and veers more toward the lyrical than the lurid.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60945-269-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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