Conan Doyle nicely and neatly updated.
Love, lust, lunacy, and drugs cloud the scientific analysis of psychic phenomena in ’20s Philadelphia.
Pleasantly nostalgic atmosphere and a personable young narrator are the attractions in screenwriter Gangemi’s more-than-competent first novel about a recent Harvard psychology graduate’s adventures in spiritual debunking. Upwardly mobile Martin Finch, whose inability to de-humanize his assigned cadavers has taken him out of med school and into psychology, lands a plum assignment when senior faculty scientist William McLaughlin hires him as an assistant. McLaughlin is part of Scientific American’s panel charged with disproving the claims of America’s best mediums to be in touch with the ghost world, and Martin quickly and happily proves he is the right man for the job as he promptly dispatches a couple of formidable charlatans. It appears that the magazine’s $5,000 reward for indisputable ties to the spirit world will remain safely in the vault until the team hears that beautiful Philadelphia socialite Mina Crawley is the real deal. Mrs. Crawley’s appeal is greatly heightened by her reluctance to travel to the magazine and by her lack of interest in the prize money. Injuries make it impossible for McLaughlin to travel, so Martin goes to Philadelphia alone, and when he is frozen out of his hotel room by a chiropodists’ convention, he lodges with the beautiful Mrs. Crawley and her rich, much older, gynecologist husband in their mansion near Rittenhouse Square. Séances ensue. Mina’s contact with the underworld is her late gay brother Walter, and he sounds awfully like the real thing. Even though Martin has locked and sealed all the doors and windows, someone other than the panelists and the Crawleys is in their darkened nursery as tables crash and pigeons appear out of nowhere. Despite falling quickly in love with the obviously disturbed Mina, Martin doggedly follows clues and digs into the very twisted Crawley history—until he Goes Too Far.
Conan Doyle nicely and neatly updated.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03279-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid.
Tóibín’s treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest’s sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tóibín fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel’s final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn’s roiling motley populace, and at the women’s boarding house where she’s virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis’s own dour and scattered one. Tóibín is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis’s first sexual experience with Tony (whom she’ll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she must fully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis’s future (literally) again and again.
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3831-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy,...
While a timid French music teacher grieves the death of her partner, outside, on the streets of Paris, his ghost lingers, lending historical context and soulful musings to a story of unresolved anguish and late love.
Chaudhry’s elegant debut rests on an unusual and risky premise: It is narrated in part by a soul in limbo. Julien Dalsace has died before the story opens, and his old-fashioned voice sets the scene: “The scent of lilacs on the breeze stirs dormant phantoms to life, but music is sorcery more potent.” We are in Paris in the year of the bicentennial, 1989, observing, like Julien, the struggles of his surviving partner, Sylvie, to cope with her loss. Julien, although spectral, is the novel’s lynchpin. The romance between him—an older, upper-class, married Jewish psychologist—and the quiveringly sensitive piano teacher is the beating heart of the story. But there’s another thread, taking the reader back to 1942, when the Jews of Paris were rounded up and deported, including Julien’s sister, Clara, and her twin daughters. Julien never forgave himself for his absence in London during World War II and his failure to save Clara, but a secret folder that emerges after his death offers Sylvie the opportunity to conclude his quest to discover the fate of Clara’s girls. Julien’s curious perspective—on history, on other ghosts, on the beauty but complexity of France generally and the Île Saint-Louis, his corner of Paris, in particular—is the novel’s most original aspect. Elsewhere, while Chaudhry brings a kind of reverent seriousness to events both past and present, her approach is more familiar. Characters are often simple, like the kindly Jewish baker, the protective (but kindly) concierge, the sympathetic American lodgers, and even Sylvie’s anthropomorphized terrier, Coco. And resolutions, even sad ones, arrive with coincidence and ease.
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy, might well touch a popular nerve.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54460-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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