Duncker gets the high melodrama and pedagogy of a Victorian novel right but does not achieve the contemporary distance that...
Scandalous novelist George Eliot throws 1870s Berlin society into a tizzy in Duncker’s (The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge, 2010, etc.) Victorian roman à clef.
Feckless Max Duncker (not a coincidental surname) is assigned by his older brother and publishing partner to get the pseudonymous Middlemarch author (referred to by the authorial Duncker only as “Mrs. Lewes” or “the Sybil”) to sign their contract. Simultaneously, the elder Duncker is arranging a marriage between rakish Max and the young countess Sophie von Hahn, who is rich, spirited, and a die-hard Eliot fangirl. During negotiations, the Sybil accidentally seduces Max through her relentless pedantry about the Roman writer Lucian. Between visits to her parlor, he slouches through the pleasure city of Homburg, Berlin salons, and the German forests in set pieces that put the author’s deep knowledge of 19th-century society to good use. Sophie resents the restrictions of her class and gender, but when her beloved, bejowled author meddles in her engagement, she becomes enraged by the Sibyl’s influence on Max. This love triangle relies on the reader being convinced of two things: Max and Sophie’s love for each other and men's magnetic attraction to the Sibyl. Unfortunately, Duncker tends to declare emotional truths without shoring them up, such as the very pinnacle of Max and the Sibyl’s intimacy: “Something intangible in her company lifted him up from the swamps of his own selfishness. He vowed he would never visit a prostitute or gamble at the tables again.” Additionally, if the reader does not share Duncker’s fascination with the moralizing writer, the narrator’s frequent interruptions of the period piece with commentary and scholarly analysis become tedious.
Duncker gets the high melodrama and pedagogy of a Victorian novel right but does not achieve the contemporary distance that has made other neo-Victorian tales so delectable.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-064-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.
A daughter reveals the intertwined tales of her mother—a theatrical legend—and herself, a mature retrospective of sharing life with a towering but troubled figure.
Katherine O’Dell, star of stage and screen, blessed with beauty, red hair, and a gorgeous voice, “the most Irish actress in the world,” was not Irish at all. She was born in London, and the apostrophe in her name crept in by error via a review following one of her appearances on Broadway. However, the fact that Katherine is “a great fake” doesn’t cloud the love her daughter, Norah, has for her, a bond which exists alongside the unanswered question of Norah’s father’s identity, “the ghost in my blood.” The complexities of this mother/daughter relationship and its context in Ireland, the men it includes, and the turns both women’s lives take through the decades are the meat of this tender, possessive, searching new novel from Man Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist Enright (The Green Road, 2015, etc.). Saga-esque, it traces Katherine back to her parents, strolling players from another era who invited her on stage at age 10, scarcely imagining the luminous, internationally recognized figure this “useful girl” would become. But the novel is no fairy tale. Katherine’s life was marked with loneliness; disappointing, sometimes exploitative, and abusive men; the pressure of trying to remain successful; a desperate act of violence; and a breakdown. Norah narrates both her mother’s life and her own—she’s the author of five novels, a mother, a sexual being, and also the sole offspring of a parent she both adored and observed at a distance. Fame, sexuality, and the Irish influence suffuse the story, which ranges from glamour to tragedy, a portrait of “anguish, madness, and sorrow” haunted by a late, explanatory glimpse of horror which nevertheless concludes in a place of profound love and peace.
Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00562-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid.
Tóibín’s treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest’s sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tóibín fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel’s final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn’s roiling motley populace, and at the women’s boarding house where she’s virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis’s own dour and scattered one. Tóibín is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis’s first sexual experience with Tony (whom she’ll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she must fully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis’s future (literally) again and again.
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3831-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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