A New York City writer and editor and his publishing-executive wife try to keep their marriage together and advance their careers and causes in Grossman’s debut novel.
Frazier Pickett lives in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan with his wife Margaret and their two kids. He works as an editor at Flying Pens, a B-list literary agency, while she’s flown up the ladder to become director of creative nonfiction at HarperCollins. Lately, Frazier has been under the spell of a French girl named Anastasie Moreau, his new muse, while Margaret has been fixated on a project concerning a poet whose work is connected to the Arab Spring. Lower Manhattan is buzzing with the beginnings of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and a pro-Israel group named Temple Mount Zionists has been making noise in New York as well as in Omaha, Nebraska. A parallel plotline, set in Russia, tells the story of Katya Ivashov, a writer in the late 1930s who’s involved with a Jewish anti-fascist group during Stalin’s purges. Her extraordinary experiences include working with Boris Pasternak at his country house as he’s writing Doctor Zhivago. As Katya struggles to find her exiled lover, Oleg, she also bears the responsibility for ensuring the publication of both Zhivago and her own book, My Long Journey Home. Back in present-day New York, Frazier and Margaret discover Katya’s story, which has profound personal and professional implications for them that also connect with the uprisings they see at home and abroad. Grossman writes with enough spirit and optimism that the novel’s complex, likable characters have room to flourish. Frazier and Margaret’s relationship is a wonderful depiction of a marriage that’s somewhat on the rocks but still has great communication and emotion: “Frazier both hated and loved Margaret’s lionhearted tenacity, probably because he wished he had more of it himself.” The author’s keen observations about the American mortgage fiasco are given with down-home realism during a crisis involving Frazier’s family in Texas. New York is shown as being as alive as ever but also filled with “dim-eyed ones who were in between dreams or broken to the point of no return.” The novel is overlong, with some paragraphs spanning multiple pages. Yet it succeeds very well at telling a story of characters discovering a hidden past as they stumble toward a more meaningful future.
An ardent, well-told story that manages to connect Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and Doctor Zhivago.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976708-9-9
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Occupy the Word Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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PROFILES
A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.
Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts “The Authenticity Project”—as he titles a slim green notebook—and begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London. After 15 years on his own mourning the loss of his beloved wife, he begins the project with the aim that whoever finds the little volume when he leaves it in a cafe will share their true self with their own entry and then pass the volume on to a stranger. The second person to share their inner selves in the notebook’s pages is Monica, 37, owner of a failing cafe and a former corporate lawyer who desperately wants to have a baby. From there the story unfolds, as the volume travels to Thailand and back to London, seemingly destined to fall only into the hands of people—an alcoholic drug addict, an Australian tourist, a social media influencer/new mother, etc.—who already live clustered together geographically. This is a glossy tale where difficulties and addictions appear and are overcome, where lies are told and then forgiven, where love is sought and found, and where truths, once spoken, can set you free. Secondary characters, including an interracial gay couple, appear with their own nuanced parts in the story. The message is strong, urging readers to get off their smartphones and social media and live in the real, authentic world—no chain stores or brands allowed here—making friends and forming a real-life community and support network. And is that really a bad thing?
An enjoyable, cozy novel that touches on tough topics.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7861-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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