Despite Mercier’s (Perlmann’s Silence, 2012, etc.) lyricism and occasional emotional acuity, the book's depiction of...
Two men from Bern who can no longer trust their hands—one is a recently retired surgeon who can't hold a scalpel without trembling and the other can't hold a steering wheel without contemplating suicide—meet by chance in a cafe in Provence.
Both are also wifeless fathers to grown daughters from whom they are estranged, or worse. Adrian Herzog, the novel’s narrator, soon learns that his new acquaintance, Martijn van Vliet, is reeling from his daughter Lea’s death. The strangers quickly bond as van Vliet tells the story of Lea’s descent due to an unnamed mental illness, beginning with the time the father and then-8-year-old girl encountered an enigmatic masked woman playing the violin in a train station. As they listened, van Vliet grew convinced that this woman’s playing had managed to pierce the armor of grief his young daughter had worn since her mother’s death a year earlier. He concludes that in this moment a "new will had formed" inside her, a will toward life, betraying her intense desire to learn to play the violin. Her knack for the instrument develops into an obsession for the pair and eventually a glamorous career for Lea—that is, until her breakdown. Van Viet tells his story with the fear that what he once considered the only way for his daughter to overcome her grief may well have been what destroyed her. Above all, he's desperate to believe in his own innocence as a father and finds in Herzog an exceedingly eager and compassionate listener. The relationship that develops between the two men is well-wrought and their subtle affinities numerous, but the book lacks a probing analysis of the father-daughter relationship. Van Vliet admits that he imagined his daughter "a fairy by nature," and her characterization is reminiscent of Romantic tropes: a precocious prodigy, a frigid and fragile "countess…unaware of her aura." Needless to say, she doesn’t speak much in her father’s tale, apart from uttering imperious commands in French. The moments later meant to signify her mental break fall flat, even in scenes meant to depict her rage. This lack is exacerbated by moments of sexist and racist outbursts from the protagonist. For instance, van Vliet says of a co-worker: "I destroyed Ruth Adamek, who had never forgiven me for not falling for her miniskirt," and frequently refers to his daughter’s psychologist as "the Maghrebi" who would cast him "black, Arab looks."
Despite Mercier’s (Perlmann’s Silence, 2012, etc.) lyricism and occasional emotional acuity, the book's depiction of suffering does little to elaborate its closing observation that "there is unhappiness of a dimension so great that it is unbearable."Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2166-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In Tyler's latest testing of the strangulating tugs and miraculous stretch of familial and marital ties, a middle-aged Baltimore couple (inexplicably linked, like so many of Tyler's lovers) take a one-day's detour-clogged trip to a funeral. It's a circuit of comic bumps and heartbreaking plunges that takes them home again to dwindling hope and options, but also to the certainty of love. Maggie Moran, 48, a nursing-home aide (although years ago, her purse-lipped mother had demanded college), was certainly a "klutz." Everyone, including Maggie's "closed-in, isolate" husband Ira, thought so. Maggie had a "knobby, fumbling way of progressing through life" feeling "as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus. . .and if she made the smallest adjustment everything would settle perfectly into place." Maggie had indeed "adjusted" the focus of young Fiona, pregnant by Maggie and Ira's failure-bound son Jesse, at the very door of the abortion clinic (surrounded by amateur picketers). Through some hardworking, warmhearted lying, Maggie had forged Jesse and Fiona's marriage; and Maggie's "breathing lessons," coaching Fiona in pregnancy, had as much control over her granddaughter's birth as all Maggie's efforts to prevent the break-up of a young marriage with no connective tissue. Now Maggie is bent on retrieving Fiona and granddaughter back to Jesse—another Moran who's "thrown away his future," like Ira, who had dreams of being a doctor, but was hobbled by his own family, whom he loved and hated. (Could it be, however, in the words of a splintery geezer, netted by Maggie on the highway, that "what you throw away is all that really counts"?) Before the visit to Fiona, there's the funeral, and middle-aged classmates watch silent movies of their young selves. The camera had recorded Maggie and Ira as "ordinary"—in the way a sea shell marks genus but not the undulations of existence. Once home, Maggie's carousel of hopes stops, and she cries out: "What are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?" But Ira, wiser, shrewder, offers and welcomes love. A seriocomic journey in which, as always, underlying the character-rooted, richly comic turns, is Tyler's affectionate empathy for those who detour—and "practice life" to "get it right.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1988
ISBN: 0345485572
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
Deep and deeply funny.
A surreal love story about the courtship between a living woman and a dead man.
Rachel is a dark-haired, red-lipped reference librarian living in Brooklyn for whom romance, so far, has been a general disappointment. “I have fallen in love with my own daydreams,” she explains, “and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” But the men disappoint, in the end. “It was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream,” she says, but rather that the men were too weak to “withstand the daydream’s reality.” And then, at the bus stop, she sees Thomas and becomes fascinated by this electric, sad-seeming man. He notices her, too, drawn to her perpetual air of alert discomfort, “like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey,” and one Saturday, she follows him onto his bus instead of her own and their courtship begins. (“Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging,” she observes, in one of the book’s many delightfully blunt and correct observations.) The problem, of course, is that Thomas is dead. But because of an “institutional error”—the institution being death—he is “insufficiently dead” and so must be temporarily “re-manifested,” returned to a body that “exactly resembles” his own until “the Office” is able to “complete the procedures necessary to process” his arrival. They have issued a set of instructions designed to help him navigate this new phase of his not-quite-existence, all designed to prevent him from incurring regrets. “Sexual contact” is not advised in this state; it is “the most efficient way to incur regrets.” And also, his body is beginning to dissolve. It is a plot that could be—that should be—unbearably twee, oppressively quirky, in love with its own melancholy. Instead, Bonnaffons’ (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) first full-length novel is a rare pleasure: a philosophical rom-com too weird, too bodily, too precise, too fun to get bogged down in trembling sentiment.
Deep and deeply funny.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-51616-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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