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
A fresh voice in psychological suspense.
An original take on a familiar pop-culture motif.
The “final girl” is a trope familiar to film scholars and horror-movie fans. She’s the young woman who makes it out of the slasher flick alive, the one who lives to tell the tale. After she survives a mass murder, the media tries to make Quincy into a final girl, but she refuses to play that part. Instead, she finishes college, finds a great boyfriend, and builds a comfortable life for herself on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s managed to bury her trauma under a mountain of Pinterest-ready sweets—she runs a successful baking blog—and psychological repression. Then another final girl, a woman who's tried to be a mentor to Quincy, dies of an apparent suicide, and the cracks in her carefully constructed world begin to show. Reporters come looking for her. So does Samantha Boyd, another survivor. It’s clear that Sam is trouble, but precisely what kind of trouble is one of the mysteries of this inventive, well-crafted thriller. Quincy might look like a model survivor, but that’s only because she’s managed to conceal both her reliance on Xanax and her penchant for petty theft. Quincy is convinced that she and Sam can help each other, but Sam’s bad habits mesh a little too neatly with Quincy’s own. As she begins to lose control, Quincy starts to doubt Sam as she gets ever closer to truths she’s managed to suppress. While most of the book is written from the heroine’s point of view, Sager weaves scenes from the night Quincy’s friends were slaughtered into the narrative. This is a clever device in that it gives readers information that Quincy can’t access even as it invites readers to question her claims of memory loss. Also, knowing the outcome of this horrible event makes watching it unfold nerve-wracking. This is not to say that readers can feel secure about knowing what they think they know. Sager does an excellent job throughout of keeping the audience guessing until the final twist.
A fresh voice in psychological suspense.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98536-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing.
A debut novel about class strife, masculinity, and brotherhood in contemporary Trinidad.
Adam—herself a native of Trinidad—tells the story of Paul and Peter Deyalsingh, twins of Indian descent whose lives rapidly diverge. Paul is socially awkward, a bundle of nervous tics and strange habits, and from a young age he is dubbed unhealthy by his industrious father, Clyde, who works tirelessly doing physical labor at a petroleum plant in order to afford a better life for his children—or, at least, one of them. As he ages, his family becomes convinced that he is "slightly retarded," and he is marked as doomed in comparison to his precociously intelligent brother, Peter—the "healthy" child. After Peter's unexpected success on a standardized test, Clyde and his wife, Joy, single him out as gifted while communicating to Paul that his possibilities are far more limited. Joy works hard to keep her children together—"The boys are twins. They must stay together," she frequently demands—but Peter's intellectual gifts create a chasm between him and Paul. Peter is destined to leave the island, while Paul's horizon never exceeds hard labor, like his father before him. Despite the efforts of Father Kavanagh, a kindly Irish Catholic priest who takes it upon himself to teach Paul, the family is forced to make an irrevocable decision that will determine the boys' fates. Adam excels at sympathetically depicting the world of economic insecurity, unpredictable violence, limited opportunity, and mutual distrust that forces Clyde and Joy to make their fateful decision. Unfortunately, however, the novel telegraphs its biggest plot twist. One can see the narrative gears turning very early, and as a result Clyde's decision isn't harrowing; by the time its necessary consequences unfold, a reader might be less moved than Adam hopes. It doesn't help that many of the characters are sketchily drawn at best. Clyde, Joy, and Peter are not vividly depicted, and the decision that renders Paul disposable seems to emanate out of a psychological vacuum. In the absence of any emotional stakes, the last third of the novel unfolds like a generic thriller. That's unfortunate, as Adam has otherwise written an incisive and loving portrait of contemporary Trinidad. Paul is the most fully realized character: Adam movingly depicts his struggle to break free of his family's conceptions of his abilities. As a result, the novel is most moving when it becomes a heart-rending character study of post-colonial adolescence that recalls V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming.
A fascinating novel that fails to stick its landing.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57299-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: SJP for Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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