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 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
As Jessie Burlingame lies handcuffed to her bed in Gerald's Game (p. 487), she recalls how, on the clay 30 years ago that her dad molested her, she had a vision of a woman—a murderer?—at a well King explains that vision here: Dolores Claiborne is the woman, and her story of how she killed her husband, and the consequences, proves a seductively suspenseful, if quieter, complement to Jessie's shriek-lest of a tale. The garotte-tight Gerald's Game is one of King's most stylish novels, and the Maine author flexes more stylistic muscle here, having feisty Dolores tell her tale in a nonstop monologue, rich in Down East dialect, that steadily gathers force. Dolores, 65, is speaking to Andy Bissette, sheriff of the island offshore Maine where she's lived her life, most of it as housekeeper for Vera Donovan, a wealthy "bitch." We soon learn that Dolores has a confession to make—in her own sweet time ("I feel a draft in here, Andy. Might go away if you shutcha goddamn trap"). Amidst details—often crudely funny—of her power-plays with Vera, and of her early life, we learn how, years back, Dolores's rotten husband began molesting their teenaged daughter, then stole her college funds. Dolores's retribution—the killing—forms the story's centerpiece, and, taking place on the same day that Jessie's dad molested her, forges the psychic bond—neither elaborated on nor explained—between the two women. It's Dolores's final years with Vera, though, and the bitter manner of Vera's death, that have brought Dolores to the sheriff—and that ultimately transform this, like Gerald's Game, into a devastating tale of heroism in the face of life's suffering. Without the flash and twisted fun of Gerald's Game, this may not sell as well (despite a 1.5 million first printing); but Dolores is a brilliantly realized character, and her struggles will hook readers inexorably.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 1992
ISBN: 0451177096
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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