The title perfectly captures the tone of French author Alard’s second novel, which examines a marriage in crisis as if it were a working, or perhaps broken, machine.
In 2003, techie Juliette and her husband, Olivier, are the Parisian equivalents of Brooklynites, raising their two adored children in a formerly rough but gentrifying Parisian neighborhood where they are surrounded by a circle of like-minded, urbane friends. Then Olivier announces that for three weeks he’s been sleeping with a socialist politician he met in his work as a reporter. Olivier says he wants to stay married but needs time to break things off with emotionally fragile Victoire. Juliette hasn’t forgotten that days after their first kiss, Olivier betrayed her by meeting another woman; he and Juliette didn’t get back together for three years. Looking back, it would be easy to blame Olivier for his pattern of betrayal, but as he and Juliette struggle to repair their relationship, overtly simple explanations become tangled in the complexity of their connection to and resentments against each other. Olivier has acted abominably and remains difficult to trust, but Juliette—despite a history that includes her father’s abandonment when she was 5, an abortion, and a rape—refuses to let anyone consider her a victim. As much as she wants to fall to pieces, she doesn’t. Alard records the couple’s evolution moment to moment—internal thoughts, endless conversations, and a range of telling gestures—in obsessively minute detail. For Juliette, sex becomes an expression of feelings but also a tool. Olivier backslides with phone calls and meetings that he at first hides from Juliette as he gradually disengages from Victoire. Page by page, the marriage’s survival is uncertain.
More jaded and demanding than most American domestic tragicomedies, this novel packs a surprising emotional wallop, raising questions about the natures of passion and marriage within the context of early-21st-century French politics with references to France’s Muslim veil controversy and Simone de Beauvoir.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-731-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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