A sympathetic story unevenly told.
When an aging architect, once a genius in his field, travels back to London in an effort to save one of his 1960s apartment buildings from demolition, he's in for an overdue emotional makeover.
“The journey of my life hasn’t yet reached its terminus, even if the buffet car has closed. I just need to feel that I’m doing more than marking time.” So speaks the eponymous hero of Packer’s first novel, a story sometimes lightly voiced yet suffused with regret and a creeping sense of mortality. As it opens, Otto, 79, a Holocaust survivor now in poor health and retired to a glorious Swiss villa of his own devising, is fading into a life of memory and reverie. But a magazine article announcing the planned destruction of Marlowe House, a peak of Otto’s and his late wife Cynthia’s achievement, revitalizes his sense of purpose. Soon he’s returning to England to appear in a television documentary intended to help save the building. This journey into the past becomes Otto’s opportunity to review his life, both personal and professional, which Packer lays out via extended flashbacks and letters. The tone is sincere, sometimes poignant, yet the psychology is comparatively shallow: Otto’s rifts with Cynthia and estranged son Daniel seem to turn on trivial or unlikely behaviors, explained in part by Otto’s wartime suffering. As the filming proceeds and Otto revisits old haunts, a mood of lugubriousness intensifies, and Otto’s brilliant career takes on the decaying, doomed feel of Marlowe House itself. Restoration is imminent, however—a cozy business of loose ends tied and rifts mended, in keeping with the novel’s simple, sometimes-sentimental objectives.
A sympathetic story unevenly told.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07154-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation.
A free-spirited, essayistic novel exploring the complex links among art, parenthood, and making a living.
If this foray into autofiction by Zambreno (Screen Tests, 2019, etc.) initially feels aimless, that’s by design. Trying to make ends meet as a writer and teacher in New York, the unnamed narrator is struggling to complete a book tentatively titled Drifts. Her goal is to tell a story that’s intimate yet free of story arcs and the baggage of character: It is “my fantasy of a memoir about nothing.” So the forward movement in the early going has less to do with plot than its “series of moods or textures,” the steady accrual of quotidian events: reading about artists and poets (Rilke and Dürer are particular favorites); arguing with her husband about moving; walking the dog; masturbating; binge-watching TV. Zambreno holds the reader thanks to the punchy, brief paragraphs and her quirky, gemlike sentences (“I began smoking again after we saw the stray kitten hit by one of the speeding cars on the corner”). The narrative gets a sense of order (or a different kind of disarray) once the narrator becomes pregnant; there’s less of a feeling of “the vastness and ephemerality of the day,” but Zambreno harbors no easy platitudes about how motherhood gives women a sense of purpose. (The section covering it is titled “Vertigo.”) Rather, it applies a different kind of economic, emotional, and artistic pressure, prompting the narrator to think further about how her physical transformation impacts her senses of time and self. The charm of this novel is how it makes this deep uncertainty feel palpable and affecting; its fragmentary nature is a feature, not a bug. Adrift, the narrator engagingly tangles with everything from the Kardashians to Joseph Cornell for a sense of fellow-feeling.
A lyrical, fragmentary, and heartfelt story about the beauty and difficulty of artistic isolation.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08721-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
A promising start to a family saga about ordinary people.
The inaugural volume of Gregory’s (Dark Tracks, 2018, etc.) new series is set during the English civil war.
A wise woman is at the center of this launch. Alinor, an herbalist and midwife, is reminiscent of Jacquetta (The Lady of the Rivers, 2011), another Gregory protagonist, foundress of the Woodville dynasty of beautiful and resourceful women who figure in the War of the Roses and attract accusations of witchcraft. In 1648, the risk of such accusations is even higher, since Alinor lacks Jacquetta’s noble lineage and because an army of Puritan Christians led by Oliver Cromwell has dethroned King Charles, now confined on the Isle of Wight. Extensive atmospherics slow the action but convey a strong sense of place—the Sussex tidelands, where, on Sealsea Island, Alinor earns a sparse living selling herbs and practicing the healing arts. She also invites scrutiny because her abusive husband disappeared months before. Detail abounds about the 17th-century economy of a small island: The local lord, Sir William, still holds sway thanks to a deal with Parliament, and his tenants each have their trade. Alinor’s brother Ned, a staunch anti-royalist, runs the family ferry business, her daughter Alys, also beautiful, works for the miserly Mrs. Miller, whose family controls the tide-driven mill. Everyone makes their own ale. When Alinor meets James, a disguised Catholic priest who has been summoned by Sir William, her fortunes change for both good and ill. James, a spy from the exiled English court in France, is embroiled in a plot to rescue King Charles. With James’ help, Alinor’s son Rob is assured of a brighter future under Sir William’s patronage. Alinor and the handsome James are instantly drawn to one another, and his vow of chastity falls to the wayside, with rather unpleasant results once he is called back to France. There are chilling descriptions of what Puritans in power are prepared to do to women who deviate from social norms—or merely incite envy. Once the jeopardy accelerates, this is Gregory par excellence.
A promising start to a family saga about ordinary people.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8715-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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