Barbara’s saga is powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful, but the novel’s stylistic challenges—frequent snippets of...
Poetic and tragic, a theologian’s debut traces a harrowing course of spiritual and psychological healing as a California woman fights to recover from resurfaced memories of childhood abuse.
Barbara’s ordeal begins after she emerges from being stuck in a darkened elevator, and her life rapidly unravels. No longer able to face her students in the classroom, she retreats to her home, alone and deteriorating mentally and physically until a concerned neighbor gives her the name of a good shrink. Barbara’s sessions with him advance fitfully. After weeks of sitting in silence, not uttering a word, she progresses to the point where she can briefly leave him the pieces of her beloved, broken cello, shattered when, in the depths of her despair, she dropped it over the upstairs railing at her house. And then, encouraged by his patience and sympathy, she slowly and meticulously shares her memories: her father experimenting on her with his set of dental tools; her father burying her under the house, straws left in her mouth for breathing; her mother lifting her from her playpen to set her hands and feet on the opened—and hot—oven door. As she grapples with these and other events in her childhood, however, Barbara also has more positive forces at work on her. Her nosy, good-hearted neighbor, the widow Josephine, involves her in a vastly different life next door. Her former love of gardening and music sustain her unexpectedly as she attempts to recover the life she had. And, above all, the steady stream of postcards from Daniel, whose work has taken him to England but whose heart remains with her, reminds her of other memories of the two of them together, loving memories that may help bring her back from the grip of her brutal past.
Barbara’s saga is powerfully imagined and profoundly insightful, but the novel’s stylistic challenges—frequent snippets of verse interspersed with voices past and present—at times seem excessive.Pub Date: April 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-172-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.
Wayne’s latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide.
In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia’s MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who’s illegally subletting his great-aunt’s rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state—acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone—that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth—mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. “He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat,” our protagonist realizes, “and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it.” And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic—a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment—with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible.
A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-400-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
In this new novella by the Nobel Prize-winner, a Colombian-village murder 20 years in the past is raked over, brooded upon, made into a parable: how an Arab living in the town was assassinated by the loutish twin Vicario brothers when their sister, a new bride, was rejected by her bridegroom—who discovered the girl's unchastity. Cast off, beaten, grilled, the girl eventually revealed the name of her corrupter—Santiago Nassar. And, though no one really believed her (Nassar was the least likely villain), the Arab was indeed killed: the drunken brothers broadcasted their intentions casually; they went so far as to sharpen their murder weapons—old pig-sticking knives—in the town market; and the town, universal witness to the intention, reacted with epic ambivalence—sure, at first, that such an injustice couldn't occur, yet also resigned to its inevitability. As in In Evil Hour (1979) and other works, then, what Garcia Marquez offers here is an orchestration of grim social realities—an awareness that seems vague at first, then coheres into a solid, pessimistic vision. But, while In Evil Hour threaded the message with wit, fanciful imagination, and storytelling flair (the traits which have made Garcia Marquez popular as well as honored), this new book seems crammed, airless, thinly diagrammatic. The theme of historical imperative comes across in a didactic, mechanistic fashion: "He never thought it legitimate," G-M says of one character, ironically, "that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so there should be the untramelled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold." (Also, the novella's structural lines are uncomfortably close to those of Robert Pinget's Libera Me Domine.) So, while the recent Nobel publicity will no doubt generate added interest, this is minor, lesser Garcia Marquez: characteristic themes illustrated without the often-characteristic charm and dazzle.
Pub Date: April 15, 1983
ISBN: 140003471X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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