A Buddhist seeker’s painful journey—occasionally irritating, ultimately illuminating.
In Brandt’s novel, a depressed young woman journeys from New York City to the Himalayas to find herself.
In June 1986, 27-year-old Ellie Adkins lives alone in a four-room apartment in Spanish Harlem and works in a boring, entry-level job at a small nonprofit downtown. Her boyfriend, Seth Federman, has abruptly moved to California to work on Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial campaign, and her best friend Cass is away for the summer. Introverted and lonely, she slides deeper and deeper into apathy and passivity. Searching for the secret to happiness and the truth about love, she rejects an intrusive co-worker’s suggestions of Prozac and therapy and seeks answers in books on magic and spirituality. A flyer in a bookstore leads her to weekly lectures on Buddhism by the charismatic Calvin Ross at a 14th Street loft. Soon she’s entangled in a clandestine relationship with Calvin, a much older man with a long white beard, a slight paunch, and narcissistic tendencies. Cass returns in the fall, with a new punk look and an infatuation with a man who wants to lead an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. When Ellie travels to Nepal with Cass’ mountain-climbing group, much of what she thought she knew is upended, and she is forced to accept new truths. The author’s spare, direct writing style and pithy descriptions of people and places vividly portray late-1980s New York City. Though intelligent, articulate, and beautiful, Ellie seems unable to say no or to express her true feelings, continually accepting dismissive and demeaning treatment from those around her. Her frustrating lack of agency—an authentic portrayal of depressive thinking—makes her hard to warm up to at first, but her keen perception and frank self-awareness (“When I wake now, there is maybe a nanosecond of me being who I used to be, then I think of Calvin, and become who I am now: a harpy, swooping down to take bites out of myself”) draw the reader in.
A Buddhist seeker’s painful journey—occasionally irritating, ultimately illuminating.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9786185728021
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Strangely stuffy and muted.
The little-known story of the Black woman who supervised J. Pierpont Morgan’s storied library.
It's 1905, and financier J.P. Morgan is seeking a librarian for his burgeoning collection of rare books and classical and Renaissance artworks. Belle da Costa Greene, with her on-the-job training at Princeton University, seems the ideal candidate. But Belle has a secret: Born Belle Marion Greener, she is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard, and she's passing as White. Her mother, Genevieve, daughter of a prominent African American family in Washington, D.C., decided on moving to New York to live as White to expand her family’s opportunities. Richard, an early civil rights advocate, was so dismayed by Genevieve’s decision that he left the family. As Belle thrives in her new position, the main source of suspense is whether her secret will be discovered. But the stakes are low—history discloses that the career-ending exposure she feared never came. There are close calls. J.P. is incensed with her but not because of her race: She considered buying a Matisse. Anne Morgan, J.P.’s disgruntled daughter, insinuates that Belle has “tropical roots,” but Belle is perfectly capable of leveraging Anne’s own secrets against her. Leverage is a talent of Belle’s, and her ruthless negotiating prowess—not to mention her fashion sense and flirtatious mien—wins her grudging admiration and a certain notoriety in the all-White and male world of curators and dealers. Though instructive about both the Morgan collection and racial injustice, the book is exposition-laden and its dialogue is stilted—the characters, particularly Belle, tend to declaim rather than discuss. The real Belle left scant records, so the authors must flesh out her personal life, particularly her affair with Renaissance expert Bernard Berenson and the sexual tension between Belle and Morgan. But Belle’s mask of competence and confidence, so ably depicted, distances readers from her internal clashes, just as her veneer must have deterred close inquiry in real life.
Strangely stuffy and muted.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-10153-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An impressive literary balancing act that entertains as it enriches.
A hefty political page-turner about what it means to have money and how we fall in love with it.
Tarkington begins his pungent political drama with an epigraph from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, announcing his lofty intentions before the novel proper has even begun. By turns sprawling and intimate, the book looks at the blessing and curse of Southern noblesse oblige through the eyes of those who have and those who don’t. Arch Creigh got his leg up from a new-money uncle, and he sees his future in the realm of Republican politics in his native Nashville. His boyhood friend, also the story’s narrator, is Charlie Boykin, a conscientious poor kid with a young, pretty mom and only a few scruples about accepting a helping hand. Tarkington is a gifted storyteller, largely because he knows how to let his finely developed characters do the heavy lifting. Money isn’t all that separates the novel’s nouveau riche from its reluctant strivers. There’s also the matter of idealism, always an iffy prospect in politics; and authenticity, which grows elusive as fine living and friends in high places seduce and destroy what lies in their paths. Charlie, who didn’t grow up with money, essentially falls in love with what and whom it represents, including Arch’s wife, Vanessa. Tarkington weaves in some scandal—an affair, an abortion, and enough secrets to keep readers guessing. But he’s not just prompting the next page turn. The novel is concerned with what lies beneath both the best intentions and worst impulses. There’s a tantalizingly thin line between love and desire here. Mistaking one for the other is easy. It’s also catastrophic.
An impressive literary balancing act that entertains as it enriches.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61620-680-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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