With his labored, sometimes overwrought style, second-novelist Lewis (Sister, 1993) gussies up a rather ordinary tale of deception and intrigue: a study in identity that never fully explores the unreliability of its strange narrator. The first-person story is told in the voice of a fortyish woman, originally named Caroline Harrison, who—we find out by the end—is speaking to her teenage daughter, explaining her aimless life of reinvented selves and a crime committed nearly 20 years earlier. As a 27-year-old fleeing a bad marriage in New York City, Caroline literally crashes in Sugartown, Texas, a small, idyllic community where she finds work as an orderly in an old-age home and friendship with a fellow drifter named Bonnie Moore. The novel veers into improbability when the two women get caught up in a Sugartown riot (over police brutality), during which Bonnie dies and Caroline bashes in the skull of a policeman. Assuming Bonnie's identity, Caroline heads back east, eventually ending up in upstate New York, where an old codger from the nursing home has sent her with a mysterious package. In a remote house in the woods, Caroline can't figure out whether she's a prisoner or a guest of the three ex-cons holed up there; nor is she certain what they're doing with the eight-year-old who's living with them. Eventually, the trio lets her in on their scam—they're counterfeiters, not the pornographers she'd suspected. As soon as they finish their work, they head west, where, with a new identity, Caroline gives birth to a daughter fathered by one of the cons—the same daughter to whom she directs this entire narrative, an explanation of their endless moves and of the cops who finally burst through the door. The elements of the thriller—unexpected turns and surprising coincidences—serve to propel a novel that never seems entirely sure of itself. Despite bursts of sharp imagery and startling turns of phrase, Lewis's odd book falls short both as art and mystery.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-609-60109-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.
In her fourth novel, Mandel (The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear, his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Station Eleven Miniseries to Star Mackenzie Davis
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SEEN & HEARD
None
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Brightwas from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned. But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
None NonePub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
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