Obvious and overlong, but nevertheless a well-mannered tale, narrated at a nice steady pace in the best old-fashioned way.
In an updated and more geriatric version of Now, Voyager, Sedgwick (The Dark House, 2000) portrays a young psychiatrist unlocking the closets and airing out the skeletons in the ancestral home of an unhappy Boston Brahmin.
Madeleine Bemis is one of those dignified old New England women who can’t lose her good taste even in the midst of a nervous breakdown: One day she is found in Filene’s, curled in a fetal position in the bedding department’s best four-poster. Also in the store is a psychiatrist, Alice Matthews, who intervenes and helps check Madeleine into a mental hospital. Madeleine becomes Alice’s patient, and, in the course of her treatment, she and Alice become good friends. Profoundly depressed and not given to self-revelation in the best of times, Madeleine tells her story with the greatest reluctance and only after much prodding from Alice. The daughter of a prominent though not especially wealthy Boston family, Madeleine made a good marriage to a handsome and extremely eligible young man with whom she lived contentedly for many years, until his death in 1979. But there were parts of her past that remained hidden from everyone in her world—even from her husband. The most prominent of these was the affair she had with Gerald, a gardener who worked briefly for her parents during WWII. Slightly crippled with a deformed foot, Gerald was a dark, brooding sort unlike any of the men Madeleine had met at her family’s dances and parties. As Alice slowly pieces together the fragments of Madeleine’s recollections, she becomes aware of another person who seems to be haunting Madeleine as well: a younger man named Brendan, who was recently found by swimmers, floating dead in the ocean. But who was he? And what was he to Madeleine?
Obvious and overlong, but nevertheless a well-mannered tale, narrated at a nice steady pace in the best old-fashioned way.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019565-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
An evocative work about love, fate and redemption.
Up beyond Asheville, near where Gunter Mountain falls into Tennessee, evil has come to preach in a house of worship where venomous snakes and other poisons are sacraments.
Cash’s debut novel explores Faulkner/O’Connor country, a place where folks endure a hard life by clinging to God’s truths echoing from hardscrabble churches. With Southern idiom as clear as crystal mountain air, Cash weaves the narrative from multiple threads. Jess Hall is the 9-year-old son of Ben and Julie and beloved younger brother of gentle Stump, his mute, autistic sibling. Clem Barefield is county sheriff, a man with a moral code as tough, weathered and flexible as his gun belt. Adelaide Lyle, once a midwife, is now community matriarch of simple faith and solid conscience. Carson Chambliss is pastor of River Road Church of Christ. He has caught Stump spying, peering into the bedroom of his mother Julie, while she happened to be entertaining the amoral pastor. Julie may have lapsed into carnal sin, but she is also a holy fool. Chambliss convinces Julie to bring Stump to the church to be cured by the laying on of hands. There, Stump suffers a terrible fate. Cash’s characters are brilliant: Chambliss, scarred by burns, is as remorseless as one of his rattlesnakes; Addie, loyal to the old ways, is still strong enough to pry the church’s children away from snake-handling services; Barefield is gentle, empathetic and burdened by tragedy. Stump’s brother Jess is appealingly rendered—immature, confused and feeling responsible for and terrified by the evil he senses and sees around him. As lean and spare as a mountain ballad, Cash’s novel resonates perfectly, so much so that it could easily have been expanded to epic proportions.
An evocative work about love, fate and redemption.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208814-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Simple story, well told.
From Japanese author Ogawa (The Diving Pool, 2008), the story of a struggling single mother who takes a job looking after an elderly mathematician with an unusual disability.
When the Akebono Housekeeping Agency dispatches the unnamed heroine to the shabby cottage occupied by the titular academic, there is little reason to think she would last any longer than the previous nine women who briefly worked there. He’s clearly not the average client. Seventeen years earlier the professor was in a devastating car accident that left him brain damaged, only able to remember 80 minutes at a time. He gets through the day solving math problems, and attaches notes to his clothes to remember what he needs to do. His memories prior to the accident, however, remain crystal clear, and he survives off the generosity of his widowed sister-in-law, on whose property he lives. Initially he’s not much of a talker, but the sweet, almost childlike housekeeper takes a liking to the vulnerable old man, even as she has to reintroduce herself to him every day. He teaches her about the elegance and order of numbers—his passion—while she dotes on him like a daughter. Through his lessons she sees the unexpected poetry in math and sets about solving some problems of her own. She also introduces him to her ten-year-old son, who he nicknames “Root” because the flat top of his head reminds him of the square-root sign. The professor instantly bonds with the fatherless boy, so she and Root spend more and more time at the professor’s home. The trio begins to resemble a family, with an unspoken understanding of each other that transcends language and convention. Trouble calls, though, when the sister-in-law, who has her own complicated history with the professor, misinterprets the housekeeper’s kindness as something more devious. Ogawa’s disarming exploration of an eccentric relationship reads like a fable, one that deftly balances whimsy with heartache.
Simple story, well told.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-42780-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
