A lyrical if sometimes brutal first novel about a boy’s apprenticeship to his hard-luck fisherman father on California’s northern coast, from a former professional fisherman and current screenwriter for Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks. Kîepf’s 19 years on the water pay off here in spades with his superbly observed meditation on the last three decades of a dying breed. His young protagonist, Neil, first watches from afar with fear and reverence as his father pursues life and livelihood as a salmon fisherman, venturing out in small two-man boats from the treacherous, rockbound coast of San Francisco’s Half Moon Bay. Financial hardship sends Neil out with his father beginning at age 12. Their shared profession is characterized by booms and busts as fish and storms come and go, bootleggers tempt honest men into bloody snares, and the iron-fisted Italian cannery owner ensures that no one ever crawls out from under a crushing debt. Yet the beauty of the coast and the moods of the sea are here rendered with such precision and allure that we understand Neil’s growing enthrallment, even as his parents’ marriage comes apart. Told as a series of memories by Neil as he floats on a life-raft, the plot’s vivid progression easily outweighs any irritation at a rather obvious narrative device. Gradually, Neil’s circumstances become clear: His boat sank during an illegal offshore run he and his brother agreed to make to pay off their debts. When their new employers expect them to cooperate in scuttling a boatload of illegal Chinese immigrants, Neil objects, and things go awry. He responds as his father—or any other upstanding fisherman—would, sealing his doom, and bringing the story to a satisfying and resonant end. A perfect fictional counterpart to The Perfect Storm: pithy scenes, a fine visual style, and artfully woven life stories.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7679-0244-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
A rollicking first novel from British journalist Hornby that manages to make antic hay of a young (barely) man's hopeless resolve not to come of age. Rob Fleming is the sort of precocious loser whose life has gone so unaccountably wrong that some deep romantic grief must be invoked to explain it. ``The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking,'' according to Rob, ``are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.'' As a case in point, the 35-year-old Rob not only listens to these songs himself but peddles themas the founder and proprietor of Championship Vinyl, a seedy vintage-record store in a quiet back alley of North London. Business is hardly booming these days, and the shop would have gone under long ago but for Rob's lawyer- girlfriend Laura, who has propped it up time and again with cash from her own very ample pool. Once she dumps Rob, however, everything is suddenly on the verge of collapsefiscally and emotionallyand Rob is forced to ask himself how he landed in such a mess. Naturally, he has no idea, so he proceeds to look up his ex-girlfriendsall the way back to high schooland ask them why things never worked out. As a pilgrimage, Rob's quest bears more resemblance to Monty Python than Chaucer, and his own inability to put two and two together somehow endears him to the very women whose affections he seems least able to requite. Reality bludgeons him in the end, and he succeeds, as the plot is spun, in drawing a few morals that surprise him by their simplicity and point toward a happy endingor at least a second chance. Fast, fun, and remarkably deft: a sharp-edged portrait that manages at once to be vicious, generous, and utterly good-natured.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-57322-016-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.
A financier's Ponzi scheme unravels to disastrous effect, revealing the unexpected connections among a cast of disparate characters.
How did Vincent Smith fall overboard from a container ship near the coast of Mauritania, fathoms away from her former life as Jonathan Alkaitis' pretend trophy wife? In this long-anticipated follow-up to Station Eleven (2014), Mandel uses Vincent's disappearance to pick through the wreckage of Alkaitis' fraudulent investment scheme, which ripples through hundreds of lives. There's Paul, Vincent's half brother, a composer and addict in recovery; Olivia, an octogenarian painter who invested her retirement savings in Alkaitis' funds; Leon, a former consultant for a shipping company; and a chorus of office workers who enabled Alkaitis and are terrified of facing the consequences. Slowly, Mandel reveals how her characters struggle to align their stations in life with their visions for what they could be. For Vincent, the promise of transformation comes when she's offered a stint with Alkaitis in "the kingdom of money." Here, the rules of reality are different and time expands, allowing her to pursue video art others find pointless. For Alkaitis, reality itself is too much to bear. In his jail cell, he is confronted by the ghosts of his victims and escapes into "the counterlife," a soothing alternate reality in which he avoided punishment. It's in these dreamy sections that Mandel's ideas about guilt and responsibility, wealth and comfort, the real and the imagined, begin to cohere. At its heart, this is a ghost story in which every boundary is blurred, from the moral to the physical. How far will Alkaitis go to deny responsibility for his actions? And how quickly will his wealth corrupt the ambitions of those in proximity to it? In luminous prose, Mandel shows how easy it is to become caught in a web of unintended consequences and how disastrous it can be when such fragile bonds shatter under pressure.
A strange, subtle, and haunting novel.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52114-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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