Atkinson's follow-up to her Whitbread-winning Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996) is a self-consciously smart and mildly amusing family saga. Isobel Fairfax, age 16, narrates the busy goings-on at Fairfax Manor, an ostensibly cursed mock-Tudor in a suburb in northern England—although the events she describes may well be fantasies, embellished with tidbits from Shakespeare and Ovid and whatever else she's reading in school. The Fairfax family, as Isobel presents them, is a wildly dysfunctional cast of caricatures: There's sour Aunt Vinnie, who's always draped in cats; brother Charles, who's obsessed with alien abductions; and ineffectual dad Gordon and his plump second wife Debbie, who imagines that the sausages she's about to barbecue are moving about on their plate. When Isobel is not deep in lustful thoughts about Malcolm, the local gynecologist's son, she time-travels and has brief and remarkably uneventful interludes in earlier eras. And both she and Charles desperately miss their long-disappeared mum, Eliza. World War II hero Gordon plucked glamorous Eliza from the rubble of a London bombing, then brought her home to the Manor, where his widowed mother and Vinnie criticized her every move. Although besotted with his wife, Gordon couldn't break with his mother, and the marriage was strained. During a picnic, Charles and Isobel were left alone, only to toddle upon the body of their mother: Did Gordon kill her before disappearing for seven years to avoid the law, leaving his kids to repress the memory and get brought up by Vinnie? This is only one of many hyperventilating mysteries that Isobel sifts through: violent deaths, stolen babies, and sexual peccadilloes galore crowd Fairfax family history. Isobel's semi-jaded wisecracking serves up some mild laughs, but this exercise in over-deliberated cleverness, while never dull, is ultimately more exhausting than engaging. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15550-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.
How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery; Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds; Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company; and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in "the kingdom of money." Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into "the counterlife," a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure.
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52114-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
As Jessie Burlingame lies handcuffed to her bed in Gerald's Game (p. 487), she recalls how, on the clay 30 years ago that her dad molested her, she had a vision of a woman—a murderer?—at a well King explains that vision here: Dolores Claiborne is the woman, and her story of how she killed her husband, and the consequences, proves a seductively suspenseful, if quieter, complement to Jessie's shriek-lest of a tale. The garotte-tight Gerald's Game is one of King's most stylish novels, and the Maine author flexes more stylistic muscle here, having feisty Dolores tell her tale in a nonstop monologue, rich in Down East dialect, that steadily gathers force. Dolores, 65, is speaking to Andy Bissette, sheriff of the island offshore Maine where she's lived her life, most of it as housekeeper for Vera Donovan, a wealthy "bitch." We soon learn that Dolores has a confession to make—in her own sweet time ("I feel a draft in here, Andy. Might go away if you shutcha goddamn trap"). Amidst details—often crudely funny—of her power-plays with Vera, and of her early life, we learn how, years back, Dolores's rotten husband began molesting their teenaged daughter, then stole her college funds. Dolores's retribution—the killing—forms the story's centerpiece, and, taking place on the same day that Jessie's dad molested her, forges the psychic bond—neither elaborated on nor explained—between the two women. It's Dolores's final years with Vera, though, and the bitter manner of Vera's death, that have brought Dolores to the sheriff—and that ultimately transform this, like Gerald's Game, into a devastating tale of heroism in the face of life's suffering. Without the flash and twisted fun of Gerald's Game, this may not sell as well (despite a 1.5 million first printing); but Dolores is a brilliantly realized character, and her struggles will hook readers inexorably.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1992
ISBN: 0451177096
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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