Smartly tuned and as unsettling as it intends to be.
An embittered man blasts an old buddy for fictionalizing his life. But, wonders Coady (Saints of Big Harbour, 2002, etc.), who can know what the facts are?
This novel in emails is told by Gordon "Rank" Rankin Jr., who has just discovered that his life has been turned into fodder for a novel by Adam, with whom he shared a lot of drinks and a few intimacies in college. Now firmly middle-aged, Rank is angry at the perceived betrayal, and his early missives have a threatening tone. But while he doesn’t exactly soften—he exemplifies the book’s title throughout—he does grow expansive, venting about his dead mother, hot-tempered father, squandered hockey scholarship, drinking and more. If Rank isn’t an unreliable narrator, Coady at least makes him a profoundly benighted one, incapable of recognizing that his anger is mainly with himself. That’s revealed in the condescension he expresses about nearly every person he recalls interacting with (besides his sainted mother), and that’s most clearly in evidence with his much-mocked father, nicknamed Gord, who's shallow but by no means a failure as a single father. The novel’s plot turns on a handful of violent incidents that implicate Rank, and Coady expertly renders a man who’s compelled to address his past but not entirely ready to look in the mirror. Like many narrators of questionable stability, Rank gets over on raw intelligence; Coady gives him a wit that makes his anger and smugness tolerable. And bubbling under this story is an interesting tussle with the question of what novelists owe to the experiences that inspire their fiction. Has Adam sold out Rank? We never hear Adam’s side of the story, but Rank’s response (and by extension, the novel) is a caution to tread carefully.
Smartly tuned and as unsettling as it intends to be.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-96135-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.
A young man dying of AIDS returns to his Ohio hometown, where people think homosexuality is a sin and the disease is divine punishment.
Brian left Chester when he was 18, seeking freedom to be who he was in New York City. Now, in 1986, he’s 24, his partner and virtually all of their friends are dead, and he’s moving into the disease’s late stages. “He turned his back on his family to live a life of sin and he’s sick because of it,” thinks his mother, Sharon; nonetheless she says yes when Brian asks if he can come home after years of estrangement. His father, Travis, insists they must keep Brian’s illness and sexuality a secret; he makes Sharon set aside tableware and bedclothes exclusively for their son and wash them separately wearing gloves. Sickels (The Evening Hour, 2012) doesn’t gloss over the shame Brian’s family feels nor the astonishing cruelty of their friends and neighbors when word gets out. Brian’s ejection from the local swimming pool is the first in a series of increasingly ugly incidents: vicious phone calls, hate mail to the local newspapers, graffiti on the family garage, a gunshot through the windshield of his father’s car. Grandmother Lettie is Brian’s only open defender, refusing to speak to friends who ostracize him and boycotting the diner that denied him service. Younger sister Jess, taunted at school, wishes he’d never come home and tells him so. This unvarnished portrait of what people are capable of when gripped by ignorance and fear is relieved slightly by a few cracks in the facade of the town’s intolerance, some moments of kindness or at least faint regret as Brian’s health worsens over the summer and fall. Sharon and Travis both eventually acknowledge they have failed their son; she makes some amends while he can only grieve. Sickels’ characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel.
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-62-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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