Kluge’s sharp writing and vivid descriptions elevate what could have been yet another novel about a frustrated writer’s...
An unfinished novel haunts a college writing teacher’s life.
Perhaps drawing upon his experience as a writer in residence at Kenyon College in Ohio, Kluge (Final Exam, 2005, etc.) offers a fictional, expansive and discursive take on a teacher’s writing life at a small, unnamed college in Ohio. As he nears the end of a 35-year career as a creative-writing teacher, George Canaris is killed in a hit-and-run one spring morning as he takes his daily constitutional. In its laudatory obituary, the New York Times hails two novels Canaris wrote early in his career, but concludes the reasons behind the fallow literary career that followed remain a mystery. For decades Canaris had promised a novel that never materialized. The work—with the not-too-subtle title The Beast—became his albatross and ultimately led the college to encourage Canaris to step aside to make room for the latest hot, young author. Going through the teacher’s home, his literary executor finds a manuscript in the refrigerator. The work, alas, is not The Beast, but a memoir entitled Gone Tomorrow. The journal follows two tracks, an account of his final days as a teacher and a chronological journal of his life. Kluge’s vision is panoramic. He moves from Prague, where Canaris was born, to California, where he wrote a novel about Hollywood; then to Ohio; briefly to Manhattan; then, near the end, back to Prague, where the idea for The Beast first took hold. A full slate of sharply sketched characters fill out the canvas—a film star with whom Canaris has an affair; colleagues and administrators collegial and nasty; and writing students frustrating and rewarding. Through all this The Beast hovers, in the same way that “Rosebud” haunts Charles Foster Kane. If the novel even exists, what does it tell about its author?
Kluge’s sharp writing and vivid descriptions elevate what could have been yet another novel about a frustrated writer’s second act.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-090-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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