Brilliantly imagined. Artfully written. Superbly entertaining.
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 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
A smartly observed tale of immigrant life that cannily balances its optimistic tone with straight talk.
A family from Mexico settles in Delaware and strives to repair emotional and physical wounds in Henríquez’s dramatic page-turner.
The author’s third book of fiction (Come Together, Fall Apart, 2006; The World in Half, 2009) opens with the arrival of Arturo and Alma Rivera, who have brought their teenage daughter, Maribel, to the U.S. in the hope of helping her recover from a head injury she sustained in a fall. Their neighbors Rafael and Celia Toro came from Panama years earlier, and their teenage son, Mayor, takes quickly to Maribel. The pair’s relationship is prone to gossip and misinterpretation: People think Maribel is dumber than she is and that Mayor is more predatory than he is. In this way, Henríquez suggests, they represent the immigrant experience in miniature. The novel alternates narrators among members of the Rivera and Toro families, as well as other immigrant neighbors, and their stories stress that their individual experiences can’t be reduced to types or statistics; the shorter interludes have the realist detail, candor and potency of oral history. Life is a grind for both families: Arturo works at a mushroom farm, Rafael is a short-order cook, and Alma strains to understand the particulars of everyday American life (bus schedules, grocery shopping, Maribel’s schooling). But Henríquez emphasizes their positivity in a new country, at least until trouble arrives in the form of a prejudiced local boy. That plot complication shades toward melodrama, giving the closing pages a rush but diminishing what Henríquez is best at: capturing the way immigrant life is often an accrual of small victories in the face of a thousand cuts and how ad hoc support systems form to help new arrivals get by.
A smartly observed tale of immigrant life that cannily balances its optimistic tone with straight talk.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35084-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.
A heartland novel that evokes the possibility of everyday miracles.
The third novel by Wisconsin author Butler (Beneath the Bonfire, 2015, etc.) shows that he knows this terrain inside out, in terms of tone and theme as well as geography. Nothing much happens in this small town in western Wisconsin, not far from the river that serves as the border with Minnesota, which attracts some tourism in the summer but otherwise seems to exist outside of time. The seasons change, but any other changes are probably for the worse—local businesses can’t survive the competition of big-box stores, local kids move elsewhere when they grow up, local churches see their congregations dwindle. Sixty-five-year-old Lyle Hovde and his wife, Peg, have lived here all their lives; they were married in the same church where he was baptized and where he’s sure his funeral will be. His friends have been friends since boyhood; he had the same job at an appliance store where he fixed what they sold until the store closed. Then he retired, or semiretired, as he found a new routine as the only employee at an apple orchard, where the aging owners are less concerned with making money than with being good stewards of the Earth. The novel is like a favorite flannel shirt, relaxed and comfortable, well-crafted even as it deals with issues of life and death, faith and doubt that Lyle somehow takes in stride. He and Peg lost their only child when he was just a few months old, a tragedy which shook his faith even as he maintained his rituals. He and Peg subsequently adopted a baby daughter, Shiloh, through what might seem in retrospect like a miracle (it certainly didn’t seem to involve any of the complications and paperwork that adoptions typically involve). Shiloh was a rebellious child who left as soon as she could and has now returned home with her 5-year-old son, Isaac. Grandparenting gives Lyle another chance to experience what he missed with his own son, yet drama ensues when Shiloh falls for a charismatic evangelist who might be a cult leader (and he’s a stranger to these parts, so he can’t be much good). Though the plot builds toward a dramatic climax, it ends with more of a quiet epiphany.
The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-246971-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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