An egregious misstep in an otherwise estimable career.
A retired insurance salesman returns to his native Brooklyn to die—and is instead recalled to life—in Auster’s uncharacteristically upbeat 12th novel (Oracle Night, 2003, etc.).
Nathan Glass, approaching 60 and diagnosed with lung cancer, has a lot to die for: He’s long divorced, estranged from his adult daughter, exhausted from years of toiling for Mid-Atlantic Accident and Life. Then, like an Iris Murdoch character, he becomes involved in others’ lives and experiences the gratifications of contingency. Nathan’s nephew Tom Wood has forsaken a promising academic career, gone to seed and settled for an unrewarding job at Brightman’s Attic, a used bookstore run by “born prankster” Harry Dunkel (aka Brightman), a gay art and manuscript forger who, during impassioned bull sessions with Tom and Nathan, discloses his hopeful vision of an imaginary utopian “Hotel Existence” (which echoes Tom’s abandoned thesis on “Imaginary Edens” in classic American literature). The plot keeps thickening with the arrival of Nathan’s nine-year-old great-niece Lucy, daughter of Aurora (“Rory”), Tom’s promiscuous, drug-addled, vagrant sister. A trip to Vermont brings serendipitous accidents, ends at a country inn that’s the incarnation of Harry’s idealized fantasy and gives Tom a second chance at fulfillment. But “accident and life” break in, returning the principal characters to Brooklyn to rearrange their lives and relationships—a pattern, re-echoed at the conclusion, in which Nathan survives and looks to the future, on the verge of an ominously significant Date in Recent History. The novel is energized throughout by fancy symbolic footwork, and intermittently by Nathan’s habit of recording “the slapstick moments of everyday life” in a loose gathering of jottings he calls The Book of Human Folly. But it’s hard to be ironic and warm and fuzzy simultaneously, and the American novelist who most closely resembles England’s Ian McEwan really shouldn’t try to be Anne Tyler (or, God help him, Nicholas Sparks).
An egregious misstep in an otherwise estimable career.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7714-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
Wonderful fun and very moving: it’s a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.
After two self-indulgent detours, Atkinson proves that her Whitbread Award–winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996), was no fluke with a novel about three interconnected mysteries.
They seem totally unrelated at first to private detective Jackson Brodie, hired by separate individuals in Cambridge, England, to investigate long-dormant cases. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared from a tent in her family’s backyard in 1970; 34 years later, her sisters Amelia and Julia discover Olivia’s stuffed toy in their recently deceased father’s study and want Jackson to find out what he had to do with the disappearance. Theo Wyre’s beloved 18-year-old daughter Laura was murdered by a knife-wielding lunatic in 1994, and he too hires Jackson to crack this unsolved murder. Michelle was also 18 when she went to jail in 1979 for killing her husband with an ax while their infant daughter wailed in the playpen; she vanished after serving her time, but Shirley Morrison asks Jackson to find, not her sister Michelle, but the niece she promised to raise, then was forced to hand over to grandparents. The detective, whose bitter ex-wife uses Jackson’s profound love for their eight-year-old daughter to torture him, finds all these stories of dead and/or missing girls extremely unsettling; we learn toward the end why the subject of young women in peril is particularly painful for him. Atkinson has always been a gripping storyteller, and her complicated narrative crackles with the earthy humor, vibrant characterizations, and shrewd social observations that enlivened her first novel but were largely swamped by postmodern game-playing in Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000). Here, she crafts a compulsive page-turner that looks deep into the heart of sadness, cruelty, and loss, yet ultimately grants her charming p.i. (and most of the other appealingly offbeat characters, including one killer) a chance at happiness and some measure of reconciliation with the past.
Wonderful fun and very moving: it’s a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-74040-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging and suspenseful look at how the patriarchy shaped women’s lives in the 1950s and continues to do so today.
A wife in 2018 discovers letters and a cookbook from her house’s previous inhabitant—and realizes that their lives might not be so different.
Alice Hale doesn’t want to move from her tiny Manhattan apartment to a fixer-upper in the suburbs. But her husband has long wanted to move out of the city, and Alice, recently out of a job, feels like she doesn’t have a reason to say no. The free time may even give her more of a chance to start her novel-writing career. But when Alice discovers a cookbook and letters left behind by the house’s previous owner, Nellie Murdoch, she gets more inspiration than she bargained for. Alice pores over Nellie’s letters to her mother (mysteriously never mailed) to learn the minutiae of her life as a slightly bored housewife—the cooking, cleaning, and Tupperware parties. Alice even enjoys testing out the cookbook, making vintage recipes like Baked Alaska. But as readers see in chapters from Nellie’s point of view, her life wasn’t just a parade of fancy desserts and dinner parties—she was harshly controlled by her cruel and physically abusive husband. Nellie spent as much time hiding her bruises as she did making a home, being sure to keep the sordid details of her life a secret. Meanwhile, Alice is keeping a few secrets of her own from her husband. He doesn’t know that she was really fired from her last job or that she has no desire to get pregnant with the child he wants to have immediately. But as Nellie gains the courage to take control of her life, so does Alice—even if both of them might have to resort to dramatic measures. Brown (The Life Lucy Knew, 2018, etc.) skillfully alternates between Alice’s modern world and Nellie’s in the 1950s. With plentiful historical details (including recipes and depressingly hilarious marriage advice), the pages devoted to Nellie come to life. As both women both start to feel even more stifled in their marriages, Brown ratchets up the tension and pulls off a surprising—but satisfying—ending.
An engaging and suspenseful look at how the patriarchy shaped women’s lives in the 1950s and continues to do so today.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4493-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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