The talented Baker returns with sex for sophisticates, making Vox (1992) seem like a warmup exercise. A 35-year-old office temp and grad-school dropout, Arno Stine has the ability to stop the flow of time—a talent he discovered when he had a case for his fourth-grade teacher ``and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on.'' Which he did, by switching on a toy transformer and, when everything around him was struck into a time- frozen motionlessness, taking off his own clothes and a pretty good number of Miss Dobzhansky's. Ever since, he's been doing what he calls the ``Drop,'' putting the entire universe on pause and dropping into the ``fold'' or the ``fermata,'' pretty much at will, by flicking a switch, pushing his glasses up, or snapping his fingers. And what does he do when everything except himself goes on hold (and even the raindrops stop falling)? Well, mainly he masturbates—and masturbates and masturbates—often with, or near, or onto, women whom, under cover of the time-freeze, he's disrobed, or followed home, or in one ingenious way or another aroused with an aim to observing them (and joining them, separate and unseen) in orgasm. Arno considers himself harmless, tenderhearted, sensitive, even considerate (he's fond of ``giving'' sex toys to women, who'll never know where they came from), but to the reader he's—well, a one-note symphony, indisputably a gifted stylist (he's writing—as you read it—his autobiography), but psychologically pretty much skin (and more skin and more skin) deep. Arno Stine is, by and large, more interesting to watch than listen to. The metaphor of time-stop as art-power, and art-power as sex- power, has its allure. But drama is drama and porn porn, this among the most literary-respectable of the latter that money can buy.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41586-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's...
A young woman with a knack for trick shooting heads west in the late 1800s to track down her outlaw brother.
Jessilyn Harney, the folksy narrator of Larison’s third novel (Holding Lies, 2011, etc.), has grown up watching her family lose its grip on its prairie homestead: Her mother died young, and her father is an alcoholic scraping by with small cattle herds. He’s also persistently at loggerheads with Jess' brother, Noah, who eventually runs off to, if the wanted posters are to be believed, lead a Jesse James–style criminal posse. So when dad dies as well, there’s nothing for teenage Jess to do but head west to find her brother, which she does disguised as a man. (“A man can be invisible when he wants to be.”) Her skill with a gun gets her in the good graces of a territorial governor (Larison is stingy with place names, but we’re near the Rockies), which ultimately leads to Noah and a series of revelations about the false tales of accomplishment that men cloak themselves with. Indeed, Jess’ success depends on repeatedly exploiting false masculine bravado: “I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm,” she writes. The novel’s plot is a familiar Western, with duels, raids, and betrayals, brought thematically up to date with a few scenes involving closeted sexuality and mixed-race relationships. But its main distinction is Jess’ narrative voice: flinty, compassionate, unschooled, but observant about a violent world where men “eat bullets and walk among ghosts.” The dialogue sometimes lapses into saloon-talk truisms (“Men is all the time hiding behind words”; “Being a boss is always knowing your true size”). But Jess herself is a remarkable hero.
Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's voice is engaging and down-to-earth.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2044-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.
The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-92721-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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