Tosches would have us believe that he is Orson Welles, writing badly for dough and well for posterity. But Little, Brown...
From cultural critic and occasional novelist Tosches (Where Dead Voices Gather, 2001, etc.), a personal Commedia of errors that may not be the book of the millennium he aims for.
The plot turns on the original handwritten manuscript of The Divine Comedy, which has turned up in a secret room under the Vatican. A New York gangster has a shot at grabbing it, so who does he call to authenticate the pages? A “fictional” Nick Tosches, who coincidentally has published all the same books as the real Nick Tosches. Nick’s a shady figure with ties to the mob and a love of blackjack, but he also happens to have been obsessed with Dante for many years. Meantime, the story of the discovered manuscript is compelling, if often offensively vulgar, and the interplay between its thrill ride and a narrative history of Dante’s life makes for fascinating rhetoric. But the part of the novel everyone in the book industry has been waiting to read is the long rant against the publishing industry. About a quarter of the way in, Tosches makes an abrupt turn to lament the half-dozen conglomerates that have taken over (including his own publisher) and spends a few pages laying into senior editors (including his own). Is he really surprised by the sorry state of the book-business? Granted that he’s right (he is), then how is it that In the Hand of Dante, which he assures us no one will understand, has been published? None of this has anything to do with the Dante manuscript, and it’s disheartening to watch the same intelligence that produces “You would today be hard-pressed to find a senior editor in New York who had heard of Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, let alone read it” also descend to the lameness of “Fuck him. Fuck her. Fuck the other guy. Fuck you, whoever you are. Fuck you all.”
Tosches would have us believe that he is Orson Welles, writing badly for dough and well for posterity. But Little, Brown promises only that it will be “the most talked-about book of the decade.” No wonder he’s pissed.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-89524-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
In a neighborhood where pain—"adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids"—is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year—and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil—but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970), in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1973
ISBN: 0375415351
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
BOOK REVIEW
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Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.
Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.
When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents—blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James—older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia—a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nath—to slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-571-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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