Divorce is the tonic note of this volume of new Updike stories, his first in seven years. True to form, each story here hugs a particular stage in a man's life—and whether Updike makes him an engineer, potter, or an archaeologist, he's the same sensitive man. Children now are almost fully grown; one wife has been left, another taken. Guilt, skin disease, and other "problems" visit these narrators. Some of the pieces are weed-slight: travelogues of Reno and Ethiopia and a highway vacation with children. The attempts at humor—"Minutes of the Last Meeting"—are predictably lame; also a bit tired are the religious/sexual communions. Strongest, probably because most deeply, passionately felt, are the stories of a divorce in the making: "Separating," about Updike's famille de plume, the Maples, is one of his best. But the surprise of the collection is a story called "Transaction": a married man in a strange city contracting for the services of a street prostitute. Edge and light are contributed here by the straining, word-staining extra inch that Updike goes in order to capture an experience and sensation that's newly shaming; his stories lately have so strongly become personal essays, stacked-up catalogues of reactions, that this departure into nervous newness absorbs, as a risk taken, a stepping out into shaky ground. Otherwise, it's an uneven volume, falling in sum a bit short of prime Updike—but the best stories here are among the best anywhere.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1979
ISBN: 0449211037
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
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A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
13
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Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility (2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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