A cold, dark novel—but a worthy one.
The latest fiction from versatile and distinguished veteran Bell (Devil’s Dream, 2009, etc.) provides a grim, pitiless look at the ways that violence perpetuates itself.
Mae is a middle-aged woman in desert self-exile. By day she deals blackjack in a casino; by night she roams the sere landscape above her trailer, peering out at the world through a rifle sight—a predator in semi-retirement. After 9/11, she sits rapt—and a little enraptured—before her television, watching endless replays of the crashing planes in a way that has an unmistakable erotic charge: "a plane biting into the side of a building, its teeth on the underside where the mouth of a shark is." Then, in a shot of survivors crawling from the wreckage, she spots her ex-lover Laurel—bloodied, kneeling, supplicant. Mae records the image, makes an endless loop of it and begins watching the clip obsessively. She dispatches a friend to locate Laurel, whom she hasn't seen in decades—and who, like Mae, has good reason to be unfindable. Meanwhile, Mae begins reflecting on the unbroken chain of violence that has made her the damaged, semi-feral person she is. First came five years of incestuous abuse by her brother, who taught her both to hunt and to cut herself, a habit she's carried on all these years; then her would-be escape to San Francisco, where she immediately fell first into prostitution and then into this novel's chilling version of the Manson family. The book's devotion to anatomizing and exploring violence in all its forms—it resembles at times a hybrid of mid-career Cormac McCarthy and the film collaborations of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez—can make it wobble between poignancy and near-parody—eventually it devolves into something like a body count conducted in lyric prose. Further, the echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice seem overdone. But Bell's skills as a novelist are amply in evidence, and the reader cannot quite look away.
A cold, dark novel—but a worthy one.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-74188-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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