A wan, overly familiar portrait of domestic angst.
A seemingly just-so family is thrust into a generationlong spate of turmoil.
Dacey’s debut novel in many ways feels like a throwback to the domestic yarns of Updike and Cheever, in which the tensions are relatively mild cases of white-collar crime and white-bread infidelity. We meet the Kelly clan in the early 1990s, as patriarch Robert, a real estate agent on the eastern coast of Massachusetts, sublimates his masculinity issues (domineering father, cushy German post during the Vietnam War) into cheating and an illegal land scam; and matriarch Irene, a one-time aspiring artist constrained by motherhood, drifts into bulimia and her own affair. Forced to absorb this unhappiness are their two sons, Nathan and Andrew. They’ve lost touch with dad, who drifts from scheme to scheme (professional gambler, car-maintenance racket pitchman); though mom is still in town, she’s emotionally distant. Midway through the novel leaps to the present day, as one son has some literal war stories and another is dissatisfied in his professional success. Dacey writes capably about a variety of milieus—real estate and construction, military, Cape Cod culture—with some moments of humor and absurdity. (Robert takes his young boys to see Full Metal Jacket; Irene has a meaningful run-in with The Exorcist star Linda Blair.) And, especially with Irene, he captures the slow-motion ennui that stalks stifled ambitions. (“Maybe that’s all a marriage really is, trying, failing, trying again, until one or the other gives up.”) But the novel overall feels like a stiff arrangement of scenes in service of a pat message that children inherit their parents’ baggage; Dacey's story collection, We’ve Already Gone This Far (2016), is filled with pungent tales of loss and struggle in working-class Massachusetts, but at novel length his storytelling is drier and more attenuated. And though the sweet-and-sour ending fits the overall mood, it’s also too carefully constructed to feel persuasive.
A wan, overly familiar portrait of domestic angst.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62779-467-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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