An attractive cast and the author’s evident love of Puerto Rican culture save (but barely) this restrained portrait of a...
A pleasant if somewhat vague debut about an aviatrix in the 1920s.
The Demarests of New York have a lovely country house, entertain intellectuals, and are raising their only daughter to have a mind of her own—a novel idea at the time. The idyll ends when Lenora’s mother suddenly dies, and father and daughter (Lenora is now 17) decide to start anew in Puerto Rico. Henry Demarest buys a grapefruit plantation and the two quickly settle into their new tropical life. They are benevolent and freethinking employers, and only occasionally do their new friends mention dissatisfaction at American occupation of their island. Lenora finds an admirer in Ignacio, who, through a generous gift of an Italian medallion, spurs on Lenora a lifelong interest in jewelry. Still, her love of fine gems dulls in comparison to her desire to fly, which dates from her meeting a certain aviator, George Hanson, on first coming to Puerto Rico, when the pair struck up a long-term correspondence, and Lenora began to dream of the sky. The years go by and Ignacio continues to pursue Lenora, as does George (who teaches her to fly). Lenora begins to collect exotic animals as well as jewelry, and her father falls in love with, and marries, their young housekeeper. All this, told in short snapshot-like chapters, conveys the events but keeps the characters’ emotional lives at arm’s reach, giving an otherworldly quality to the story, with Lenora seeming more an archetype of the century’s New Woman than a fallible being. By end, the reader has been given the essentials of a life without having connected to any of the sorrow or joy. When her father dies, and Lenora inherits the plantation, she becomes an independent woman, adventuring in her plane and turning her once-ardent pursuers into cherished friends.
An attractive cast and the author’s evident love of Puerto Rican culture save (but barely) this restrained portrait of a modern woman.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621068-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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