An impressive step forward for an increasingly serious entertainer.
Polly Solo-Miller Demarest has all that she always expected to have: "a husband, two children, a strong family, and a month's summer holiday in Maine. Once she was married, her life had been so accomplished that all she had to do was live it. But it turned out that life was not a straight path. You woke up on the wrong side of the law with the right set of feelings."
That wrong side of the law is represented here by Lincoln Bennett, a painter with whom Polly has been having an inextricable affair—one that goes against the grain of her upbringing (among the rich, Jewish, very correct, and close Solo-Millers), of her love for lawyer-husband Henry. And, though the family is a haven and fidelity is a spine in a life that's otherwise treacherously jellied: "What did a smoothly run house, good meals, sweet children, and an admirable husband matter if you felt your heart being torn to pieces?" Such is Polly's quandary—and it's fleshed out with some of Colwin's most heartfelt prose: the mix of pain with authorial breeze and social-antenna perceptiveness is occasionally quite spectacular in terms of tone; there are fewer jokes than in Happy All the Time, though some of the comic description is inspired (an after-dinner pianist "played exclusively as background, but the expression on his face was that of an ingenious veterinarian who had quelled a room of anxious schnauzers"); and Colwin's drumming insistence on the conflict between (and complexity within) personal and family happiness gives this novel more than a little Russian flavor—Chekhovian intimacy, Tolstoyan responsibility, longueurs and passions. So, though the ruminant theme announced in the title flattens some of the feeling here (Polly's agony comes across only fitfully, the hurt and confusion muted by the author's nervously churning reflections), Colwin is to be credited for having gone beyond the mere charm of her previous work. And if the ingredients for emotional combustion never quite explode in this richly ambitious novel, they are graceful, unsimplified, very often strikingly—and fully—stated.
An impressive step forward for an increasingly serious entertainer.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1982
ISBN: 0-06-095897-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?
McBride follows up his hit novel Deacon King Kong (2020) with another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.
It's June 1972, and the Pennsylvania State Police have some questions concerning a skeleton found at the bottom of an old well in the ramshackle Chicken Hill section of Pottstown that’s been marked for redevelopment. But Hurricane Agnes intervenes by washing away the skeleton and all other physical evidence of a series of extraordinary events that began more than 40 years earlier, when Jewish and African American citizens shared lives, hopes, and heartbreak in that same neighborhood. At the literal and figurative heart of these events is Chona Ludlow, the forbearing, compassionate Jewish proprietor of the novel’s eponymous grocery store, whose instinctive kindness and fairness toward the Black families of Chicken Hill exceed even that of her husband, Moshe, who, with Chona’s encouragement, desegregates his theater to allow his Black neighbors to fully enjoy acts like Chick Webb’s swing orchestra. Many local White Christians frown upon the easygoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, especially Doc Roberts, Pottstown’s leading physician, who marches every year in the local Ku Klux Klan parade. The ties binding the Ludlows to their Black neighbors become even stronger over the years, but that bond is tested most stringently and perilously when Chona helps Nate Timblin, a taciturn Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of his community, conceal and protect a young orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing in an explosion. He isn’t at all “feeble-minded,” but the government wants to put him in an institution promising little care and much abuse. The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters. It’s possible to draw a clear, straight line from McBride’s breakthrough memoir, The Color of Water (1996), to the themes of this latest work.
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422946
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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