A plodding first novel, hollow at its center.
The education of a prig as an American in Taiwan evolves from self-righteous missionary to compassionate stand-in husband.
Meet Vincent Saunders, man on a mission. The 24-year-old Presbyterian from a small town in Illinois, fluent in Mandarin, is charged with establishing a ministry in Toulio, Taiwan. Free English lessons followed by Bible study: that’s the deal. The “Jesus teacher” immediately targets his landlady’s teenaged son but passes on his housemate, Alec from Scotland. Alec is Vincent’s antithesis, moody, profane and a serious hash smoker (when the drug makes him sick, Vincent wishes him a full measure of pain as a cure). But then lonely Vincent strays from the straight and narrow. Schoolgirl Trudy charms him with a fumbled kiss, and soon the two are making love five nights a week. Vincent’s missionary work falters. His commitment to Christ evaporates. But given that his whole life has been anchored by faith, it just isn’t credible that he could shuck it off like an old skin, without agonizing. Meanwhile, word of his trysts has reached Trudy’s brother, who beats Vincent to a pulp. He’ll have to leave town, but he can’t face the folks back home. Fortunately, there’s an alternative: Mr.Gwa, an affluent businessman, needs a foreigner for a sham marriage to a mainland beauty he wants brought to Taiwan; Vincent will get ten grand. Since Kai-ling lives in a desert town in China’s remote northwest, the story now turns into a travelogue, with Vincent the filter for impressions of China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. His experiences induce the epiphany that “you could navigate your life without knowing,” just loving its mystery. Arriving in Urumchi, Vincent finds that Gwa’s desert rose has her own agenda, and attention shifts to her homely sister Jia-ling. Through the twists and turns of the novel’s final third, Vincent is all heart, looking out for the vulnerable Jia-ling and visiting Alec, now a convicted drug-smuggler, in prison.
A plodding first novel, hollow at its center.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4634-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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