A fine addition to the L’Heureux canon.
A well-to-do couple is challenged by charity in this posthumous novel.
When David and Maggie Holliss, out walking their dog, first meet the aspiring novelist Reginald Parker, it’s 2001, and “they looked like what they were: a couple suspended between middle and old age, happy, wealthy, content. And comfortably godless.” David is a soon-to-retire literature professor at Stanford; Maggie is a minor heiress; and their marriage is “a meeting of minds and hearts that excluded everybody else, even their children.” But when, in 2009, Reginald—still an aspiring novelist—leaps in front of a UPS truck to save their dog’s life and then promptly asks a grateful Maggie for a $200 loan, the Hollisses’ prosperous solitude is unexpectedly imperiled. In addition to his novelistic ambitions, Reginald is a narcissist, petty criminal, and freeloader who feels simultaneously insulted by and entitled to David and Maggie’s ready charity. He cadges the Hollisses for more loans—to support his family, to support his drug habit, and to punish them for their willingness to give. He also embarks on an affair with Claire, the Hollisses' caustic middle-aged daughter, and eventually deploys his own neglected child, Iris, as a pawn, first to guilt the Hollisses into giving more money, then to punish them for their refusal to give any more of it. Working in Iris Murdoch’s frantically plotted tradition, L’Heureux uses a deft, omniscient narration to highlight the little human hypocrisies within his characters and the blatant miscommunications that define their relationships. The result is a roller coaster of a novel that—despite some missteps—generally treads a careful line between comedy and caricature while engaging in a poignant commentary on the interplay between charity and justice. Early on, when Claire tells the story about how she tried to become a nun but disagreed with the Mother Superior’s emphasis on charitable acts rather than justice—“Justice includes charity because charity has to be earned,” Claire states, “it has to be deserved”—David seems to speak for the reader when he decides he’s “never heard such an exercise in sloppy thinking.” By the novel’s end, however, readers might be wondering whether Claire, unbeknownst to herself, was on to something.
A fine addition to the L’Heureux canon.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313523-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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