A cleareyed and adeptly composed investigation of a marriage.
A devastating fire causes a couple in crisis to look back over their long marriage in Golan’s (Where Things Are When You Lose Them, 2008, etc.) literary novel.
Rob and Amy Lerner are sitting in their favorite restaurant deciding to get divorced while, a few blocks away, their house burns to the ground. The fire destroys Amy’s painting studio and all of her art; Rob’s home office and all the material related to his import business; and every object, photograph, and heirloom that they owned. The couple is left staring at the rubble of their lives “like the body of a loved one under a sheet. The house was like that, a lost loved one.” The two met many years earlier in New York City, where Amy, then named Geller, was a promising—if unconfident—artist, and Rob worked as a Yeshiva teacher to avoid a military draft. At the time, Rob identified Amy with Lilith—the first wife of Adam who wouldn’t submit to his dominion, who’s sometimes interpreted as a demon and stealer of children: “To Rob Lerner [Lilith] was simply the woman you will never tire of, never look at without lust, who will never lose her mystery, the woman who will make you whole.” The couple’s relationship was always combustive, however, and even after they marry, find financial success, and raise a son, Marco, the couple is haunted by events from their pasts—Amy’s brother Mickey’s death and the traumas of Rob’s Holocaust-survivor father, Sol. The novel reviews their rocky relationship and asks where, exactly, it all went wrong. Also, how did the fire, which punctuated their dissolution, start? And what does Rob’s identification of Amy with Lilith—whom Sol claims to have seen in a Polish orchard during the war—say about the couple? Golan’s prose is exact and insightful and full of lines that encapsulate the particular deficiencies of the Lerners’ marriage: “They had grown over the years to dislike each other with a passion that would have been admirable, perhaps breathtakingly beautiful, had it been love.” He constructs the characters of Rob and Amy in a deliberate manner and with great attention to detail. With incredible specificity, the author manages to present an affecting and recognizable portrait of coupledom, and as the storylines grow, their thorny lives become more deeply intertwined. Amy, in particular, is a fully imagined being—knowable when the reader takes her side and completely mysterious when the reader aligns with Rob. The Judaica in the story’s background lends it a slightly mystical mood, and it infuses the proceedings with a grim sense of inevitability. The book does drag in some places, and the reader may be forgiven for wanting to get back to the present-day plotline before realizing that the past is the main story. That said, Golan’s skillful and compelling character work is enough to keep the readers wondering, as Rob and Amy do, about the impossibility of happiness and the meaning of love.
A cleareyed and adeptly composed investigation of a marriage.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-951214-49-4
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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