Will entertain the faithful and annoy readers who think this author has already written the same novel too many times.
Irving’s new doorstopper (Until I Find You, 2006, etc.) addresses a strong theme—the role accident plays in even the most carefully planned and managed lives—but doesn’t always stick to the subject.
His logjam of a narrative focuses on the life and times of Danny Baciagalupo, who navigates the roiling waters of growing up alongside his widowed father Dominic, a crippled logging-camp cook employed by a company that plies its dangerous trade along the zigzag Twisted River, north of New Hampshire’s Androscoggin River in Robert Frost’s old neighborhood of Coos County. The story begins swiftly and compellingly in 1954, when a river accident claims the life of teenaged Canadian sawmill worker Angel Pope, whom none of his co-workers really know. Irving’s characters live in a “world of accidents” whose by-products include Dominic’s maiming and the death of his young wife in a mishap similar to Angel’s. All is nicely done throughout the novel’s assured and precisely detailed early pages. But trouble looms and symbols clash when Danny mistakenly thinks a constable’s lady friend is a bear, and admirers of The Cider House Rules (1985) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) will anticipate that Large Meanings prowl these dark woods. The narrative flattens out as we follow the Baciagalupos south to Boston, thence to Iowa (where we’re treated to a lengthy account of Danny’s studies, surely not unlike Irving’s own, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), and an enormity of specifics and generalizations about Danny’s career as bestselling author “Danny Angel.” The tale spans 50 years, and Danny’s/Irving’s penchant for commentary on the psyche, obligations and disappointments of the writer’s life makes those years feel like centuries.
Will entertain the faithful and annoy readers who think this author has already written the same novel too many times.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6384-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
More trite truthiness from Coelho.
A Swiss journalist strives to redress the meaninglessness of her life with even more meaningless sexual encounters in Coelho’s latest pseudo-philosophical screed.
Linda, a respected newspaper reporter in Geneva, is happily married to a handsome, wealthy and generous financier. The couple is blessed with beautiful and well-behaved children, at least from what we see of the progeny, which isn’t much. The vicissitudes of domestic life aren’t Coelho’s concern unless they offer a pretext for platitudes about the eternal verities and The Things That Matter. When she interviews Jacob, a former flame from school days who's now a rising politician, Linda behaves professionally right until she administers a parting blow job. The ensuing affair jolts Linda out of the low-grade depression she has been experiencing despite her enviable lifestyle. Her adulterous behavior disturbs her, however, since she can't explain her own motives. After briefly trying therapy, she consults a Cuban shaman, to no avail (except to generate a successful series of in-depth features on occult healing). Her bafflement is shared by the reader, who will be puzzled by the total lack of any convincing reason why she should be so infatuated with Jacob, who, in addition to being very thinly portrayed, apparently can’t decide whether his amorous strategy should be sensitive and romantic or something 50 or so shades greyer. After a close call—Jacob’s astute spouse almost exposes her—Linda decides that the fling isn't worth destroying lives over, as if these shallow existences were under any threat to begin with. Along the way to this realization, Coelho milks each opportunity to preach—by way of endless interior monologues, quotes from Scripture and talky scenes—sermons about love, marriage, sexual attraction, evolutionary theory and every other imponderable he can muster. Occasional interesting tidbits about the novel’s setting, the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, are not enough to redeem the pervasive mawkishness.
More trite truthiness from Coelho.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-101-87408-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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