A perhaps overly clever debut, rich in literary allusions, that just doesn’t come to enough. Young writer Pearl Christomo, sent to a remote boarding school in Michigan, begins writing a novel that increasingly resembles her own life—which in turn resembles Hamlet’s. She’s a daughter, however, not a son; her mother has married a stepfather who wants her out of his way. Judith, Pearl’s mother, leaves Anthony, her father, a history professor and intellectual, because she wants something richer, fuller in her life. But the quest never ends, not even when she marries Martin Hamlin, a wealthy, inspirational author of self-help books. Pearl, who was only a toddler when Judith abandoned her father, now feels betrayed as a teenager by her mother’s desertion, but also angered by her seemingly insatiable, continuing need for even more to fill her life after marrying Martin. Lavishly furnishing the house that Pearl calls Elsinore, Judith next wants breast enlargement and another child. In Pearl’s own novel, meanwhile, characters like future actress Theresa, aging writer Hugh Denmark, philandering lawyer Aaron, poet Winston—and wounded women like Theresa’s alcoholic mother and Winston’s suicidal co-worker Ruth—begin to take after the people she meets at her boarding school. There’s feckless senior Charles, for instance, who introduces her to sex, as well as the reprobate visiting writer Hugo Tappan and Pearl’s hard-edged friend Walker. Their lives evoke observations on the differences between men and women, on the influence of chance, and on love. The two worlds—real and fictional’slowly glide into each other, and truth by the end proves as elusive as the ghost that haunts the school, bearing witness, like Hamlet’s father, to some past tragedy. Pearl suggests that in storytelling, as in life, there’s no going back and no way of changing what was done. A novel of promise, undone by ambition.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56689-072-1
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
