The devilish Garcia girls are back, in a warm, complex, rich and colorful third novel (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 1991; In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994). The focus is once again on the character of Yo, the oldest and seemingly boldest of the four little girls transplanted from the Dominican Republic to New York in the 1950s, when the upper-class Dominican Garcias fled their home to escape Trujillo's bloody reign. Yo, destined to become an autobiographical poet and novelist, is in trouble with her family when this latest novel begins for having published family secrets—writing about their mother's sneaky methods of scaring her young girls into obeying her, for example, and of their father's enjoyment of skiing naked. But, then, Yo's always been in trouble for telling the truth: When Trujillo was at his most treacherous, Yo's mother remembers, the seven-year-old girl discovered a gun in her father's closet and told a neighbor, a bishop loyal to the government. That led to the family's emigration. This time out the people that Yo, now in her mid-40s and a famous writer, has written about get to tell their side of the story. Her sisters, mother, old-fashioned, gallant father, ex-boyfriends, former professors, best friends, childhood nanny, and Dominican cousins—all remember and reflect on the kind, headstrong, superstitious, needy, fearful, or impulsive Yo they've known at various ages and stages of her life. The voices of Yo's family and friends are magical, and the details of life—first in Dominica, where the Garcias' wealth and social standing made daily life even under the dictatorship seem luxurious and safe, and then in the hard years in New York—are fascinating, though the stories told here are sometimes puzzling and contradictory. Still, the writing, as always, is animated and wonderfully imaginative; the characters jump off the page. A must-read for Alvarez's many fans. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56512-157-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
A second collection (after Typical, 1991) from the author of the novel Edisto Revisited (1996), etc.: nine pieces—some previously published in Esquire and Harper's—suggesting that Powell may now be one of our most linguistically inventive writers. His landscape is a South defined (that ``vale of dry tears'') by Faulkner, Ray Charles, and Andy of Mayberry, peopled with characters who flirt with madness and find the perfect language to reveal their inner turmoil. The bored housewife in ``Trick or Treat'' encourages the attentions of an unlikely suitor, a 12-year-old ``Lolito'' with a singular crush. Powell brilliantly captures the voice of his brain-damaged narrator in ``Scarliotti and the Sinkhole,'' the sad and loony ravings of a moped accident victim as he drinks beer, forgets to take his meds, and waits for his hefty settlement check. The lowest of the low, the roofer of ``Wayne,'' feels left behind by the times, not to mention his wife and kids. The three parts of ``All Along the Watchtower'' start with the drunken lyricism of its ``classical anarchist'' narrator, a Peeping Tom who skips his outpatient appointment at a mental-health clinic to fly to Mexico in search of a 50-pound chihuahua, which he finds, along with a sexy nurse who has a huge supply of Percodan. This leads into a prose-poem rant by a stroke victim—a defense of silliness and quitting—and ends with the too-long fable of loneliness and twisted desire that takes place along the watchtower, looking over ``a giant spoilbank of broken hearts.'' Powell's other man-boys, who resist being ``properly stationed in Life,'' include the abandoned dad and husband of ``Dump'' and two guys in ``Two Boys'' who seek out a Chinese healer for their various afflictions. The boozing strip-club habituÇ of ``A Piece of Candy'' comes to the sobering revelation, being now a father himself, that all those women are also daughters. If Powell crashes here and there, it's because he's raised the bar so high: This is fiction that provokes, challenges, and renews your faith in possibility.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5213-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
Ebershoff (The Danish Girl, 2000) strikes a chord over and again, sure to resonate like soulful music to some and clanking...
A well-honed but less-than-striking collection about discontented gay men caught between troubled childhoods, diminished lives, and the shifting winds of their uncertain futures.
Whether the setting is Boston or Pasadena, the men and boys inhabiting the shrunken worlds of each of Ebershoff’s seven tales have more in common than not. In “The Charm Bracelet,” Billy is a high-school kid who likes to cruise at a nearby gay bar, but has yet to go beyond being flirtatious, sharing drinks, and taking phone numbers. A chance encounter with a frightened woman in a darkened park threatens to shine some reality into his life before he shuts it out again. The title story features Roland, a 48-year-old swelled to bursting with a sense of his own importance to the community. Watching men in the locker room of his athletic club, he “boiled a batch of distaste, one that would stay with him through the day.” Like all of Ebershoff’s men, Roland longs for much more than he could ever have and pays a dear price for all that attention focused elsewhere. Similarly, in “Tresspass,” the book’s spooky conclusion, the teenage narrator sleepwalks through his stunted life, suffused with dreams of what could and should be. Some of the stories, like the opener, “Chuck Paa,” in which an acne-scarred home-health aide moves from one dying AIDS patient to another, cling to you with the intensity of their sadness and sense of limitation. But for all the assured and talented writing on display here, the refrain of themes—distant families, relentless hunting for something better, obsessions with physical perfection—and sameness of tone level out the collection’s high points.
Ebershoff (The Danish Girl, 2000) strikes a chord over and again, sure to resonate like soulful music to some and clanking repetition to others.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89483-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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