Under the funky trappings, Wener’s third (after The Perfect Play, 2004) is a satisfying coming-of-age novel with a...
Family drama with surreal touches finds British former pop star Wener (of the ’90s band Sleeper) back in good form.
When her overachieving lawyer brother Daniel goes missing, family failure Claire is the only one with a clue. The theory that he’s intentionally disappeared with help from a mysterious Japanese organization may be far-fetched, but she follows the story from London back to Miami, where the family had spent a few tragic years. While her alcoholic mother, beautiful sister and Daniel’s perfect wife remain caught up in their own preconceptions, the broke, divorced Claire follows a series of odd clues. A waitress in a basement sushi joint provides one lead, a scary Russian sailor another, and soon Claire is on the road, accompanied by her ex-husband, Michael. Trustworthy only in that she knows he will disappoint her, Michael also serves as a means of returning to the city of her youth, moving them in with the dysfunctional Huey and Tess, and their boa constrictor, Harvey Weinstein. While things were weird before—that Japanese organization may only be a television program—they get truly bizarre in America, thanks in part to Valium-laced margaritas. But as Claire learns that her instincts are actually good, it’s her expectations that need adjusting. Some of the characters here are merely caricatures. The rude waitress, for example, sounds like a badly translated haiku: “How empty it would make a man feel,” she says. “How rotten and bruised like soft autumnal fruit dropped prematurely from the tree.” And some situations, such as the encounter with the pet boa’s namesake, are straight slapstick. But even the odder characters ring true emotionally, no matter what their obsessions—and that saves them.
Under the funky trappings, Wener’s third (after The Perfect Play, 2004) is a satisfying coming-of-age novel with a sympathetic heroine.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-084173-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the...
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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