A lovely deliverance of a debut, the writing quietly sure, the course of true love meandering through its pages, as untidy...
Though tethered to the rude vicissitudes of everyday life, this fine, sly first novel also boasts a sweet, intoxicating buffer of magic and apocalypse.
The story opens with Buddy, a made-for-TV wrestler, on the skids and headed for the edge. Our boy is just barely keeping it together with pills and beer and memories. Four years ago, Buddy’s wife Alix left him, taking his much-loved daughter to go live with the director of a movie company that had come to their hometown, Wilmington, North Carolina. Since then, Buddy has gone from wrestling hero to fall guy. Deliberately losing hundreds of bouts in a row suitably reflects his rather crummy life and his oddball company of friends. Connelly draws this sidewise and impermanent world with a lighter-than-air hand, delineating a fragile existence shattered when a loony fan from the dark side of professional show wrestling shoots Buddy and a number of his ring cohorts. As Buddy seeks recovery, redemption, and reunion, Connelly keeps the action off-kilter. Buddy will meet his double, who tenders sound advice on more than one occasion; there will be a miracle (right out of Amal and the Night Visitors); one of Buddy’s homeless chums will discover the beauty of Svobodian utopianism; Buddy will fake amnesia in a ruse to win back his wife. The nimble prose has plenty of momentum; this is a story of winning back love, and readers will be pulling for Buddy. The plot backdrop—a Texas-sized asteroid headed toward Mother Earth—is, believe it or not, unobtrusive: Connelly’s magicalism is modest enough to register without a blink, and the apocalypse is more aura than menace, trivial in comparison to the cataclysm that is Buddy’s daily grind.
A lovely deliverance of a debut, the writing quietly sure, the course of true love meandering through its pages, as untidy as a construction site.Pub Date: July 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4664-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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