A feel-bad novel with an unsympathetic narrator.
In this debut novel, a 30-something man reviews his dysfunctional marriage to a vegan woman and its tragic ending.
For Mason McLaughlin, who grew up in the state of New Jersey, New York City is “where the magic happens!” He lives and works there as a software programmer, and still loves it, he says, “in spite of what has happened to me here.” Over the course of the novel, he relates exactly what happened to him. He was in love with proofreader Katherine Flanagan, but their four-year relationship broke up because he wanted to get married and have children, and she didn’t. About a year after the breakup, Mason started dating an attractive woman named Tessa Andersson, the vice president of the audit division at his workplace. They didn’t agree on everything; Mason found her veganism annoying, for example, and Tessa thought that he drank too much with his friends. (For him, six drinks was only one too many.) Still, Mason went along with what Tessa wanted to do—rising early on weekends to explore new places, for example, although he actually wanted to stay home and relax. He soon moved in with her, despite their weekly arguments, and when she accidentally got pregnant, Mason was delighted. He proposed marriage after she strongly hinted that she wanted him to do so. When their baby, Noah, was born, Mason adored being a father, but he and Tessa still fought constantly. She didn’t want to have Noah vaccinated, when he gained weight too slowly and lost strength, she refused to feed him formula—even a soy-based one. Couples counseling didn’t help them. Then a terrible tragedy ensued, followed by a jury trial, but at his nadir, Mason got a phone call from Katherine that gave him hope. Mascarenhas effectively captures the drinking-buddy culture of his narrator, as well as the atmosphere of New York City; for instance, the bed in Mason’s tiny apartment is apparently only seven steps from the door. However, much is troubling about the narrator’s characterization. The novel often reassures readers that he’s a catch, with other characters mentioning nearly a dozen times that he’s “handsome”; Tessa, who isn’t he only co-worker to be interested in Mason, tells him, “I have done some major research on you in the office and the report came out A+.” But what this report is based on is unclear, as Mason comes across as passive, incurious, and largely devoid of personality, with no interests beyond drinking, playing video games, and watching TV. He’s also inconsiderate of others: “She had warned me about using a condom when we had sex, but I never listened.” Worst of all, Mason ignores his fears about Noah in the face of Tessa’s unreasonable behavior: “She would always find a way to shut me up.” Late in the novel, when he credits Noah for reconnecting him with Katherine— as if it’s the silver lining of a very dark cloud—it feels both sentimental and horrid.
A feel-bad novel with an unsympathetic narrator.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949002-01-0
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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