Very nearly a wonderful novel, nevertheless, and clear proof that Cambor is one of the more interesting and unpredictable of...
A great fictional subject is given impressive full-scale treatment in Cambor’s strong second novel (after The Book of Mercy, 1996).
The Johnstown Flood of 1889 remains lodged in the American imagination as the classic example of a disaster that need not have occurred. It did, though, because the builders of a lavish estate in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains, commissioned by Andrew Carnegie and his fellow plutocrats (the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club), arrogantly tempted fate and ignored numerous warnings that an aging, improperly maintained dam could not withstand unusually heavy rains (“It was as if no people lived below it, no world existed in the mountains but the one they were creating”). In a richly detailed fusion of history and fiction, Cambor explores the lives of such historical figures as the Scottish-born Carnegie himself (an industrialist with the soul of an aesthete), his ruthlessly pragmatic CEO Henry Clay Frick, and tenderhearted, philanthropic Andrew Mellon, juxtaposed against those of several strikingly vivid invented characters. The latter include Civil War veteran Frank Fallon, steel mill foreman and stoical patriarch of a stricken family; his “hollowed, fractured, parched” wife Julia, who seeks consolation for her sorrows in a loving friendship with Johnstown librarian Grace McIntyre, the independent woman to whom Frank is also drawn; their son Daniel, torn between his hunger for learning and his “radical” sympathies with exploited laborers; Nora Talbot, whose secretive trysts with Daniel both distract and quicken her passionate scientific interests; and Nora’s father James, the Virginian attorney who will waste his life in frustrated efforts to make the South Fork magnates pay for their neglect. The scenes involving these characters are without exception amply imagined and beautifully written; their counterparts, focused on the imperious captains of industry “above” their unfortunate neighbors, are too often flatly accusatory and crammed with only partially dramatized historical information.
Very nearly a wonderful novel, nevertheless, and clear proof that Cambor is one of the more interesting and unpredictable of our contemporary writers.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16537-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Like the many-windowed mansion at its center, this richly furnished novel gives brilliantly clear views into the lives it...
Their mother's disappearance cements an unbreakable connection between a pair of poor-little-rich-kid siblings.
Like The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer or Life Among Giants by Bill Roorbach, this is a deeply pleasurable book about a big house and the family that lives in it. Toward the end of World War II, real estate developer and landlord Cyril Conroy surprises his wife, Elna, with the keys to a mansion in the Elkins Park neighborhood of Philadelphia. Elna, who had no idea how much money her husband had amassed and still thought they were poor, is appalled by the luxurious property, which comes fully furnished and complete with imposing portraits of its former owners (Dutch people named VanHoebeek) as well as a servant girl named Fluffy. When her son, Danny, is 3 and daughter, Maeve, is 10, Elna's antipathy for the place sends her on the lam—first occasionally, then permanently. This leaves the children with the household help and their rigid, chilly father, but the difficulties of the first year pale when a stepmother and stepsisters appear on the scene. Then those problems are completely dwarfed by further misfortune. It's Danny who tells the story, and he's a wonderful narrator, stubborn in his positions, devoted to his sister, and quite clear about various errors—like going to medical school when he has no intention of becoming a doctor—while utterly committed to them. "We had made a fetish out of our disappointment," he says at one point, "fallen in love with it." Casually stated but astute observations about human nature are Patchett's (Commonwealth, 2016, etc.) stock in trade, and she again proves herself a master of aging an ensemble cast of characters over many decades. In this story, only the house doesn't change. You will close the book half believing you could drive to Elkins Park and see it.
Like the many-windowed mansion at its center, this richly furnished novel gives brilliantly clear views into the lives it contains.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-296367-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Gloomy indeed. And yet this Arab-Israeli newcomer is never once self-indulgent or sentimental, with the result that his...
A quick, readable, highly engaging—and bluntly pessimistic—debut tale of an Arab-Israeli whose life is one of anger, fear, and broken spirit.
“I was the best student in the class,” announces Kashua’s narrator, “the best in the whole fourth grade.” So it’s possible—isn’t it?—that he’ll go far, escape his family’s drab, broken village, be a great success? He does take the very tough exam for admission to a competitive Israeli school, does pass, does get admitted, and does attend—but not successfully. There’s too much shame for him in a boarding school full of Israeli Jews, shame at simple things like not knowing how to use silverware, what music to listen to, not having the right kind of pants, not pronouncing Hebrew correctly, and shame at bigger things, like the scorn, derision, and threat both in school and on the busses that take back home at the end of the week. Kashua offers nothing new so far—mightn’t this be another tale of schoolboy alienation overcome, true merit being demonstrated, acceptance, comradeship, and success following thereby? No, the conflicts, wounds, and humiliations are too many and too deep. The boy’s grandfather died in the war against Zionism, and even his father was a hero in his own college days, imprisoned on suspicion of complicity in blowing up a school cafeteria. And so, for all his brains, the boy, torn between cultures and histories, begins to fail in school, suffer health problems, lose morale. He never does finish college, but ends up as bartender in a seedy club, despising the Arabs who come in to dance, despising even his own wife, the birth of a baby daughter notwithstanding. Life, at novel’s end, remains seedy, undirected, filled with sorrow, failure, and regret.
Gloomy indeed. And yet this Arab-Israeli newcomer is never once self-indulgent or sentimental, with the result that his story rings out on every page with a compelling sense of human truth.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4126-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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