Khosi Saqr is an all-American boy, growing up in Butte, and a descendant of William Andrews Clark, the copper-mining king who put the Montana city on the world map.
Classifying Toutonghi’s (Red Weather, 2007) second novel as a coming-of-age tale sells this superb literary effort short. For example, Khosi may be a great-great-grandson of the copper king, but he also is the son of ne’er-do-well Akram Saqr, a Coptic Christian Egyptian who seduced Amy Clark, married her and presented her staid and prosperous parents with a grandson who looked “like a tiny Yasir Arafat.” Such is the wry humor spicing up Khosi’s story. When Khosi was a toddler, Akram departed for Egypt, leaving behind his family and significant gambling debts. Now in his early 20s, Khosi still lives with his mother in a run-down Victorian they call Loving Shambles, where she operates a catering business specializing in mid-Eastern cuisine and he contemplates the heroics of Evel Knievel. Thanks to the Internet, Khosi is an autodidact, more literate and sophisticated than his college-graduate contemporaries. He works as a guide at the historical Copper King Mansion, frequents the Berkeley Pit Yacht Club, a country music bar with a sawdust floor, and indulges his OCD compulsions. He also pines for his lifelong friend Natasha Mariner, recently engaged to a preppie. Such is Khosi’s life until his father returns from Egypt. After 20 years, he wants Amy to sign divorce papers. To everyone’s disbelief, Khosi decides to follow Akram back to Egypt. “I needed to track down this missing part of my story, this vanished and fugitive sector of my genealogy, this dim adumbration of my family’s lost past.” With writing both gently ironical and outright funny, the author’s extraordinary talent draws readers into the world of Butte and Cairo. More entertainingly, his characters are both believable and appealing, especially Khosi’s Egyptian aunts, their drill-sergeant housekeeper and the everyday people he meets.
Brilliantly imagined. Artfully written. Superbly entertaining.Pub Date: July 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-38215-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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