Part page-turner and part aesthetic treatise, Rock’s (Spells, 2017, etc.) latest is, like the currents of the Great Lakes,...
“Part of my pleasure of swimming in open water, especially at night, is that it makes me afraid.”
In the summer of 1994, our unnamed narrator, a 26-year-old aspiring writer, meets Mrs. Abel, the mysterious young widow with whom he voyages by night through the swells and currents of Lake Michigan. To the narrator, and to the summer community on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula, Mrs. Abel is an enigma: She’d been married to Mr. Abel, whose name she wears like a keepsake throughout the novel, for less than a month before his death, and the cabin that she’s inherited is so sparsely decorated that everything in it—her husband’s now-scentless clothes, a wooden bird carved by a friend, a painting by Charles E. Burchfield of a forest fire marching toward a cabin—seems to possess, in the narrator’s eyes, the significance of an artifact, of objects kept because they serve as mementos of missing people or missing times. By swimming together at night, Mrs. Abel and the narrator build a secret relationship out of their shared passion—but the relationship ends prematurely when one night near summer’s close the swimmers arrive upon a strange shoal far from shore and, while exploring it, Mrs. Abel somehow disappears. Twenty-ish years later, the narrator—now a successful novelist who lives with his wife and two daughters in Oregon—is reconstructing that summer, trying to get closer to who he was, and who Mrs. Abel was, and what happened that night on the water. To do so, he pours over the artifacts left behind by that time—photographs and artworks frequent the text, as do letters to and from his ex-girlfriend. He floats in a sensory deprivation tank, studying “the past, the future, [and] the hypothetical…hidden beneath the surface” of his thoughts. He consults Rilke, Burchfield, and Chekhov, among many others. And, most significantly, he writes—thus creating out of life’s artifacts a new artifact, this book, which serves as keepsake for both Mrs. Abel and the narrator’s youth, referring eyes back upon them across the years.
Part page-turner and part aesthetic treatise, Rock’s (Spells, 2017, etc.) latest is, like the currents of the Great Lakes, subtle and haunted, deeply complex and “quietly…sinister”; his readers, like his swimmers, ought to know “that the currents of the subsurface are likely to be moving.”Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64129-000-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
A warmhearted portrait of love embracing true hearts.
The Sweeney sisters gather in Southport, Connecticut, for the funeral of their father, Bill Sweeney, a brilliant writer. An unexpected guest at his wake, however, will shift the foundations of their lives.
Not yet lucky in love, all three sisters have nonetheless landed on their feet. Liza, the eldest, has lived a safe, comfortable life in her hometown, married to boring Whit Jones after Gray Cunningham broke her heart. But she’s created a successful career with her Sweeney Jones Gallery, selling work by local artisans, including Maggie, the middle Sweeney daughter, who has put years of wild living behind her. Tricia, the youngest, ended up in New York City, working for a prestigious law firm after her graduation from Yale. When their father’s lawyer reveals that a newly discovered half sister may lay claim to part of Bill’s estate, the sisters realize that the woman at the funeral was no stranger. In fact, she was their childhood neighbor Serena Tucker, whose mother turns out to have had an affair with Bill, which Serena learned about after having taken a DNA test. Dolan (Elizabeth the First Wife, 2013, etc.) uses her experience in podcasting with her own sisters (Satellite Sisters and The Chaos Chronicles) to craft believable women characters who worry about real problems and use wry humor to push through dark moments. Faced with irrefutable DNA evidence, the sisters gently remind each other not to blame Serena, yet they brim with questions: Why did Bill pair up with Birdie Tucker, Serena’s stiff, country-club fixture of a mother? Was their parents’ marriage troubled? And why didn’t Serena come forward sooner? Is she hoping to cash in on her famous father’s death? Or is she going to put her journalism career to work and write a tell-all memoir? Struggling to remember her own childhood from a new perspective, Serena is anxious about fitting in with the tight trio of redheads. As the sisters get to know each other, they begin to restructure their family to include not only each other, but also new partners.
A warmhearted portrait of love embracing true hearts.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-290904-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Some fictional trips into 1970s New York abound with nostalgia; this novel memorably opts for grit and heartbreak.
The protagonist of this coming-of-age novel set in late-1970s New York City falls under the wing of an unlikely mentor: Lou Reed.
The Sopranos actor Imperioli’s first novel begins with a family sundered. Narrator Matthew details the death of his estranged father, his mother’s growing dependence on pills, and an inheritance that prompts the two of them to leave the confines of their Queens neighborhood for an upscale apartment in Manhattan. Among their neighbors is Lou Reed, at a point in his life when he rapidly veered from grandiose to paranoid, from generous to menacing. As Matthew comes to terms with his feelings for his classmate Veronica, he becomes increasingly aware of perspectives other than his own, along with a growing restlessness. Early on, Matthew recalls a dinner with a boorish friend of his that quickly turns violent, as he lashes out after his friend makes a number of grotesque and sexist comments. At the beginning of the next chapter, he pauses and then recants his earlier words: “I’m a liar. A liar and a coward.” Imperioli plays with this kind of narrative tension throughout. The arc of the novel—a young man forming a tense, unpredictable bond with a mercurial mentor—is familiar, but Imperioli’s lived-in details about the city help make the world feel realistic. And while some of the novel’s characters, Veronica in particular, call out for more time on the page, the end result is an immersive trip into its narrator’s memories of a turbulent time.
Some fictional trips into 1970s New York abound with nostalgia; this novel memorably opts for grit and heartbreak.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-620-7
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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