Herrin's fourth novel (The Unwritten Chronicles of Robert E. Lee, 1989, etc.): a quiet, sturdy account of a dying man's journey across the country to his deathbed, which happens to be the same bed where he was born. The author manages to turn the stuff of soap opera into a heartfelt mythical odyssey, occasionally a bit garrulous but mostly full of craft. Ed Reece, dying of lung cancer, telegraphs Larry, his estranged older son, nearly 40. Despite his wife and other children, despite a prosperous business, ``All I can say now,'' Ed tells Larry, ``is that it hasn't been enough.'' So he has Larry buy a van and off they go, without telling the family. While they travel through the Midwest on their way to Chumleyville, Alabama, where Ed was born, the two have many heart-to-hearts, and Larry, drifting until now, begins to apprehend the world: ``Death was like a solution that brought every speck of beauty out of the world around you, but that would not let you breathe, let you be.'' They visit Connie, Larry's ex-wife, who now lives in the country with Larry's two kids and her female lover. Connie is a no-nonsense woman (``We're the salt of the earth. We pull our weight out here''), and Ed convinces her to come along with grandson Jeff. After the usual road scenes—flashbacks, a van breakdown, cops (because Ed's wife is convinced that Larry ``kidnapped'' his father)—Connie and Larry are reconciled, then bargain (in an affecting tragicomic scene) with the owners of the house where Ed wants to die. Ed passes away after a vision, leaving his family- -Ed's wife and younger son are now on the scene as well—bereft but wiser. Herrin builds his novel the old-fashioned way, earning his effects with slice-of-life detail that makes the archetypal father- son journey credible and unboastful rather than literary or postmodernist.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-03010-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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