A first novel that fails in every respect—plot, characterization and language mangled beyond belief.
Cheesy melodrama about a plastic surgeon, 9/11, AIDS, blackmail and revenge.
Dr. Richard Gallin is off his game. The Park Avenue plastic surgeon has scaled back his procedures drastically; he pads around his office barefoot. It’s January 2002, and the doctor is still disoriented after the death of his son Bernardo on 9/11. The insurance money (millions!) has come through for his widow Karin, but her husband’s wedding ring was all that was retrieved from the Twin Towers. And something else is pressing on Gallin. A journalist, Nick Adams, is threatening to write an exposé about him even though there’s no dirt, unless you count his promiscuity years ago, after his wife’s death from cancer. Adams comes to the office. He’s a redhead, and that damns him; Gallin believes all redheaded males are dishonest. What’s motivating Adams is Gallin’s dismissal of his nurse Peter, who had volunteered that he was HIV positive; Adams is Peter’s lover. Gallin can handle this, but can he handle the return of Bernardo? For his son is alive! Escaping the inferno, and realizing he no longer loved his wife (hence the discarded ring), Bernardo hightailed it to Florida. Now he’s back, asking his father to change his appearance. Since he’d already created a new identity in Florida, this makes no sense; nor does it make sense that Gallin would consent to the surgery, thus participating in insurance fraud, or re-hire Peter to help him. Making sense, though, was never a consideration for a writer who values excess above everything. That excess feeds on itself when Gallin is mugged, and then hires his mugger to take care of Adams, which he does, brutally. When the mugger shows up to claim his reward (ten grand, plus surgery for his own sorry self), the story comes to a sudden halt, a resolution seemingly impossible.
A first novel that fails in every respect—plot, characterization and language mangled beyond belief.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-196-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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