A grim, ugly caricature of tragedy.
The author of Blue Horse Dreaming (2003) tells the unhappy story of a very unlucky girl.
When Jamie Hall’s mother dies, the teenager runs away to an unnamed town, an island of humanity that’s been a bitter ghost of its former self ever since the federal government flooded it to create a reservoir. For a while, she’s kept by a mean drunk she meets at a pizza parlor. Her life is already on a downward spiral when she frees a feral boy tied to a tree. It turns out that he is the junkman’s son, part of an inbred clan that lives in near-freakish squalor and depravity. Jamie’s kind act unleashes a wave of violence: The junkman wants retribution for her meddling, and the feral boy himself is mindlessly bloodthirsty. This setup is promising enough in a Gothic sort of way, but the author is able only to drain it of drama: Wallace repeatedly chooses seemingly portentous description over forward momentum. This is a novel in which a wisteria vine is “ancient,” “serpentlike” and “now barren.” It takes the author 27 words to describe a walk that Jamie takes up a flight of stairs (she reports not only every creak, but the meaning of every creak). Ironically, Wallace’s ponderous care ultimately saps all significance from her narrative. As Jamie remains in this miserable, dangerous place, one can’t help but wonder why she doesn’t move on—anywhere is better than here. But then Jamie recalls a scene from her past: Looking out the window of the apartment she shared with her mother, she sees a “long useless and long unused canal that barely flowed, which in summer was thick with scum, floating garbage, the bellied-up carcasses of small animals no one could recognize from the bloat, and even when frozen in the winter emanated a stench of stagnant water and death.” At this point, the reader realizes that Jamie’s universe is one of unremitting foulness and despair, and Wallace’s narration begins to seem farcical in its utter bleakness. At least the dog doesn’t die.
A grim, ugly caricature of tragedy.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-59692-140-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.
Rome, past and present, serves as the setting for a sparkling historical novel.
Smith (Free Men, 2016, etc.) bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love. Tom, a biologist working in contemporary Rome, is studying ostracods, tiny crustaceans that thrive in polluted, agitated environments. “Are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse?” Tom asks, aware that his question about ostracods could just as well apply to his own emotional agitation. The married father of a 9-year-old daughter, he has met a young woman who enchants him, impelling him to confront his desperate desire for “an unleashing” and for a love deeper than what he feels for his wife. A child playing in the water where he is investigating suddenly shrieks in pain, pierced by a piece of bent metal, “scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust.” It is a fishhook—maybe a castoff with no value or perhaps an ancient relic: uncanny, miraculous. The fishhook reappears as Smith leaps back to the Renaissance, where it falls into the hands of Giulia, a mixed-race princess newly married to a Medici, pregnant with another man’s child. For Giulia, her fortunes embroiled in political and religious rivalries, the fishhook evokes a holier time, before corruption and hypocrisy sullied the church. In ninth-century Rome, Felix, a 60-year-old monk, is tormented by his youthful, forbidden love for Tomaso; assigned to watch over the decaying bodies in the putridarium, Felix comes into possession of the fishhook, guessing—wishing—that it belonged to the martyred St. Prisca, who perhaps “got it direct from Jesus.” In the year 165, Prisca did indeed find the hook, secreting it as a precious token. Drawn to worshipping Christ rather than pagan gods, 12-year-old Prisca stands defiant against her violent tormenters. Perhaps Smith’s most appealing character is Satan, whose weary, ironic comments punctuate a narrative that shines with lyrical, translucent prose.
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287364-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.
A wine expert in training visits her family’s vineyard in Burgundy only to discover a cellar full of secrets.
Kate Elliott, a San Francisco sommelier and daughter of a French expatriate, is preparing for a notoriously difficult wine-tasting exam. If she passes (most don’t), she will be one of a tiny cadre of certified Masters of Wine worldwide. She has repeatedly flunked the test; her weakness is French whites, so some serious cramming at Domaine Charpin, her ancestral vineyard, is in order. There, Kate rejoins Heather, her best friend from college, who married her cousin Nico, the Domaine’s current vintner. Kate herself almost wed a vigneron, Nico’s neighbor Jean-Luc, but feared being trapped in domesticity. Decluttering the family caves, Kate and Heather discover the World War II–era effects of one Hélène Charpin—her great half-aunt, Kate learns. Why, then, do the Charpins, particularly dour Uncle Philippe, seem determined to excise Hélène from family memory? Interspersed with Kate’s first-person narration are excerpts from Hélène’s wartime diary, which her descendants have yet to find. A budding chemist whose university plans were dashed by the German invasion of France, Hélène and her best friend, Rose, who is Jewish, are recruited by the Resistance. Hélène’s father, Edouard, is also a Résistant, unbeknownst to her stepmother, who embraces the new status quo. In the present, the little Kate is able to glean from the historical archives reveals that Hélène was punished as a collaborator, one of the women whose heads were shaved, post-Occupation, as a badge of shame. An extensive subplot, concerning a hidden wine cache and another sommelier’s duplicity, adds little, whereas the central question—what is up with the Charpins?—is sadly underdeveloped. The apparent estrangement not only between the Charpins and Philippe’s sister Céline, Kate’s mother, but between mother and daughter remains unexplored. Wine buffs will enjoy the detailed descriptions of viticulture and the sommelier’s art. Mah deserves credit at least for raising a still-taboo subject—the barbaric and unjust treatment of accused female collaborators after the Allied liberation of France.
An unusual but imperfectly realized blend of trivia and tragedy.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-282331-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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