American family saga, Oates style—which means a dark household full of lust, obsessions, visions, ghosts, murders, disappearances, grotesques, mystical animals, religious conversions. . . and page after page of roiling, lazily ornate Oates prose. The book is made of 80 short, titled, often disconnected chapters—some episodes from the lives of distant Bellefleur ancestors (pioneer Jedediah wandering the hills in feverish search of God, great-great-grandfather Raphael insisting that his posthumous skin be made into a drum), but mostly tales of the vaguely 20th-century Bellefleurs on their lakeside estate in the Adirondacks-like mountains. Throughout, the wandering focus settles most often on Leah B., who has strange "powers" that seem forever frustrated: when she married handsome cousin Gideon, he squashed her pet spider named "Love"; Gideon has proven to be an insatiable philanderer (impregnating an underage local wench); so now Leah, mother of twins, burns with desire for another child—and indeed she becomes colossally pregnant (eating raw beefsteak) and gives birth to a girl baby who unfortunately has the lower half of a boy baby growing out of her abdomen. (Grandmother Della chops away the excess: "now it's a she and not a he. I've had enough of he. . .") Baby Germaine then becomes Leah's mystical guide, inspiring her to rebuild the crumbled Bellefleur empire and also secure a pardon for great-uncle Jean-Pierre II, who's been locked up for decades as a supposed mass murderer (eventually released, the old man will later massacre some Bellefleur enemies). And, while Leah pursues her obsession, a dozen other family members more or less succumb to the Bellefleur curse: a legendary vulture swoops down and kills Gideon's illegitimate baby; Gideon's poet brother Vernon ("my essence is Vernon and not Bellefleur, I belong to God, I am God") is drowned by anti-Bellefleur townies; brother Ewan gets religion; niece Yolande is raped, then avenged; nephew Raphael disappears (he's become obsessed with voices calling to him from a pond). There are recurring motifs (revenge, sin, God, modes of transport), a stream of surreal creatures (a knowing dwarf, powerful cats and dogs, rats all through the mansion, a black bear who married a 19th-century Bellefleur), and an apocalyptic finale—in which Gideon, still philandering but sick of the struggle with Leah over Germaine, flies his plane into Bellefleur Manor, kamikaze-style. But for all the connections and weavings and trappings of myth/epic, this massive novel never seems more than a grab-bag of familiar Oates preoccupations and turns of mind—the best of which turn up in a few of the entirely self-contained early-Bellefleur tales (like "The Clavichord"). And even the intermittent impacts here are diluted by Oates' overheated, increasingly undisciplined, often downright slovenly prose: parentheses within parentheses, indiscriminate italics and exclamation points, obvious ideas belabored and decorated, baroque devices unsupported by intellectual vigor or verbal panache. As always, some moody and grimly ghoulish leaps of imagination—but, overall, a great pudding of a book lacking in shape, flavor, and substance.
Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1980
ISBN: 0452267943
Page Count: 596
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
In Japan, a daughter explores the crime of passion that took her mother’s life.
Sumiko was just 7 when her mother died and her father moved away; she was raised by her grandfather, who has always maintained that her mother was killed in a car accident. Twenty years later, she answers a phone call meant for him from a prison administrator with information about inmate Kaitarō Nakamura; when the caller realizes whom she is speaking with, she hangs up. With just this detail, Sumiko begins an obsessive quest. She turns up an article headlined “WAKARESASEYA AGENT GOES TOO FAR?” from which she learns that Kaitarō Nakamura was an agent in the “marriage breakup” industry. He was hired by her father to seduce her mother in order to provide grounds for divorce. Nakamura claims that he and her mother had fallen in love and were about to start a new life together. When Sumiko visits Nakamura's defense attorney, the woman hands over all her files and videotaped interviews with her client. Weaving through the story of Sumiko’s search and her recollections of her childhood is the story of her mother and her lover, from the moment he pretended to meet her accidentally at the market and moving inexorably to the murder scene. Scott is a Singaporean British writer born and raised in Southeast Asia; her debut is inspired by a 2010 case in Tokyo and based on years of research. The book proceeds slowly, lingering on enjoyable details of Japanese landscape and food but perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages.
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54470-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.
A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1.
It’s fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. Her address contains her last name, “Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent.” When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman’s (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author’s thematic concerns and style. Selin’s closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Selin’s first romantic entanglement—which begins via electronic mail—is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language—and languages—can and cannot do. This isn’t just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. She’s smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: “we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale—albeit without morphemes.” Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative, which feels more like a collection of connected microfictions than a traditional novel, but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did.
Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-561-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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