A cleareyed lens into the strange, human wants of upper-class suburbia.
The odd interior lives of suburban Connecticut residents are unceremoniously unearthed in the interwoven stories of Acampora’s debut.
On the surface, Old Cranbury is just another New England town: picturesque, soaked in history, full of unspoken class divides, and populated with people who have abandoned New York City for, presumably, greener pastures. But beneath its exterior are wishes, dreams, and choices as grotesque as anything out of Winesburg, Ohio, and Acampora paints the town's web of relationships with lucid, unsettling prose. In “Afterglow,” a wealthy businessman becomes obsessed with touching a human brain in the wake of his wife’s tumor diagnosis. A pregnant newlywed watches helplessly as her husband becomes convinced he’s being poisoned by technology and abandons his livelihood to take up New-Age medicine in “The Umbrella Bird.” An aging gay couple struggles with the yawning gulf between them in “Elevations.” In “Moon Roof,” a real estate agent stops her car at an intersection on her way home and cannot bring herself to continue as the minutes and hours inch by. In “Swarm,” a retired teacher is given the chance to realize his artistic dreams when a couple commissions him for an ambitious installation project: giant insects obscuring every wall of their home. “If it is possible,” he wonders, marveling at his good fortune, “that a boy who sucked licorice on the sidewalks of Flatbush could be a millionaire now…then the world is a spooky and fabulous place indeed." Acampora's world is exactly this: spooky and fabulous. There are expected beats—affairs, teenage mischief, ennui, unhappy marriages—but woven through them are bizarre set pieces, unnerving hungers, and such weirdly specific desires it’s as if the author rifled through a local therapist’s filing cabinet.
A cleareyed lens into the strange, human wants of upper-class suburbia.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2355-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lyrical, urgent artistic response to a history that is still unfolding.
Searching novel of the Berlin refugee crisis by Erpenbeck, considered one of the foremost contemporary German writers.
“The best cure for love—as Ovid knew centuries ago—is work.” So thinks Richard, who, recently retired from a career as a classics professor, has little to do except ponder death and his own demise that will someday come. What, he wonders, will become of all his things, his carefully assembled library, his research notes and bric-a-brac? It’s definitely a First World problem, because, as Richard soon discovers, there’s a side of Berlin he hasn’t seen: the demimonde of refugees in a time when many are being denied asylum and being deported to their countries of origin. His interest awakens when he learns of a hunger strike being undertaken by 10 men who “want to support themselves by working” and become productive citizens of Germany. For Richard, the crisis prompts reflection on his nation’s past—and not just Germany, but the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, of which he had been a citizen (as had Erpenbeck). Richard plunges into the work of making a case for the men’s asylum, work that takes him into the twists and turns of humanitarian and political bureaucracy and forces him to reckon with a decidedly dark strain running through his compatriots (“Round up the boys and girls and send them back to where they came from, the voice of the people declares in the Internet forums”). Richard’s quest for meaning finds welcoming guides among young men moving forth from Syria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, some unable to read, one confessing that he has never sat in a cafe before, all needful strangers with names like Apollo, Rashid, and Osarobo. In the end, he learns from his experiences, and theirs, a lesson that has been building all his life: “that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.”
A lyrical, urgent artistic response to a history that is still unfolding.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2594-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of Kingsolver’s better efforts at preaching her politics and pulling heartstrings at the same time.
A young woman discovers her rural Tennessee community has been invaded by monarch butterflies in this effective tear-jerker cum environmental jeremiad from Kingsolver (The Lacuna, 2009, etc.).
At 17, English honor student Dellarobia thought she would escape a future of grim rural poverty by attending college. Instead, she got pregnant and married. Now 27, feeling stifled by the responsibility of two young children she loves and a husband she tolerates, Dellarobia is heading to her first adulterous tryst when she happens upon a forested valley taken over by a host of brilliant orange butterflies that appear at first like a silent fire. She skips the tryst, but her life changes in unexpected ways. Soon after, Dellarobia leads her sweet if dim husband, Cub, to the butterflies, and they become public knowledge. The butterflies have landed in Tennessee because their usual winter habitat in Mexico has been flooded out. The local church congregation, including Dellarobia’s mother-in-law, Hester, embraces the butterflies’ arrival as a sign of grace. Influenced by her beloved preacher, usually antagonistic Hester (a refreshingly complex character) becomes a surprising ally in convincing Dellarobia’s father-in-law not to cut down the forest for much-needed cash, although she is not above charging tourists, who arrive in increasing numbers to view the spectacle. Soon, a handsome black scientist with a Caribbean accent has set up in her barn to study the beautiful phenomena, which he says may spell environmental doom. Dellarobia is attracted to the sophisticated, educated world Dr. Byron and his grad school assistants represent. When she takes a job working with the scientists, the schisms in her already troubled marriage deepen. Yet, she is fiercely defensive against signs of condescension toward her family and neighbors; she really goes after a guy whose list of ways to lower the carbon footprint—“bring your own Tupperware to a restaurant,” “fly less”—have no relevance to people trying to survive economically day-by-day.
One of Kingsolver’s better efforts at preaching her politics and pulling heartstrings at the same time.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-212426-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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