A thoughtful, if meandering, debut about what it means to make, and remake, a self.
A journalist reconstructs the history of a recently dead writer by stepping into the life he left behind.
Salale Cannon is an aspiring writer who lives with her boyfriend, Hugh, in New York City. After the publication of an admiring magazine profile about an elusive playwright, her subject is revealed to be a plagiarist and a scumbag and to have told big lies about his life—all of which Sal failed to uncover. Now unemployed and adrift, Sal stumbles across a short story by Martin Scott Keller, a much older writer she once hit it off with at a literary event. To her shock, Sal realizes this story is about her encounter with Martin and, to her greater shock, learns that Martin is dead. Sal becomes personally invested when she learns that this story may be part of a larger unpublished novel—has he written more about her?—and is professionally inspired to chase a new profile that could redeem her reputation and put her career back on track. After a fight with Hugh, Sal heads to upstate New York to meet with Martin’s widow, Moira, a theoretical physicist. Sal moves from interviewing Moira to spending her days at the widow’s home going through archives and reaching out to others in Martin’s life to piece together a portrait not just of the man and his work, but of the people, especially the women, who loved him. Beginning in Part 2 of the novel, Weir—herself an editor at Vanity Fair—alternates Sal’s story with chapters from the lives of Martin and his circle of family and friends, rippling further into the past as the tale unfolds. In this way, the novel itself is the result of Sal’s imaginative rebuilding of Martin’s world, though one that dissipates the psychological tension that builds during Sal’s chapters. It’s a testament to Sal that we want to stay with her more than we do.
A thoughtful, if meandering, debut about what it means to make, and remake, a self.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781982189587
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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