Is it possible that Portnoy's Complaint will some day be remembered only as the book that made Philip Roth famous enough to afford to write great, quiet novellas later on? Perhaps—because The Professor of Desire (1977) was the best Roth in years, and The Ghost Writer is even shorter and even better. The theme, beautifully twisting through three twirled narrative threads, is the artist's conflict between the obsessive demands of his calling and the separate but equal demands of family, of human contact. Famous New England/Jewish writer E. I. Lonoff, for instance, has surrendered wholeheartedly to the obsession; he's lordly, wise, funny, and noble (he quietly declined a National Book Award)—but he's been driving his well-bred wife crazy with decade after decade of gentle, helpless, selfish inhumanities. And our narrator, just-beginning writer Nathan Zuckerman, comes upon the Lonoffs at their most genteel-ly violent: he has been invited to dinner to meet and commune with his idol at the isolated Lonoff home in the Berkshires, and his visit (plus Lonoff's attentions toward Amy, a bright, lovely, and apparently disturbed co-ed who's in residence to catalogue Lonoff's work) sets off flurries of domestic anguish. But Nathan also has his own human/literary bind to brood upon, and he does so while staying overnight at the Lonoffs': he has written a true-to-life story—about family bickering over an inheritance—that is an embarrassment, a torture to his New Jersey-Jewish (but distinctly uncaricatured) father; the ensuing father/son dialogue (while standing on the street waiting for a bus) is as nakedly painful as anything Roth has written, quickly followed by Roth at his angry/funniest—as a pompous Jewish community leader joins the fray over the story with "Ten Questions for Nathan Zuckerman." And there's one more variation on the writer/family theme: during that same night Nathan concocts a fantasy about mysterious Amy—she is (or believes herself to be) the Anne Frank, longing to reveal herself to her grieving father but hesitating because a living Anne would rob her diary of its literary impact. Roth underlines none of this elegant theme-weaving, letting it all emerge through dazzling dialogue and his most understated, almost folktale-like prose. (Nathan describes another, flashier famous writer he has met—"He was like California itself—to get there you had to take a plane.") Elegantly floating and at the same time firmly grounded to home and heart—a sonata-like masterwork.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1979
ISBN: 0679748989
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
PERSPECTIVES
A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at...
An iteration of a quintessential American myth—immigrants come to America and experience economic exploitation and the seamy side of urban life, but education and pluck ultimately lead to success.
Twelve-year-old Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong and feel lucky to get out before the transfer to the Chinese. Because Mrs. Chang’s older sister owns a garment factory in Brooklyn, she offers Kimberly’s mother—and even Kimberly—a “good job” bagging skirts as well as a place to live in a nearby apartment. Of course, both of these “gifts” turn out to be exploitative, for to make ends meet Mrs. Chang winds up working 12-hour–plus days in the factory. Kimberly joins her after school hours in this hot and exhausting labor, and the apartment is teeming with roaches. In addition, the start to Kimberly’s sixth-grade year is far from prepossessing, for she’s shy and speaks almost no English, but she turns out to be a whiz at math and science. The following year she earns a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Her academic gifts are so far beyond those of her fellow students that eventually she’s given a special oral exam to make sure she’s not cheating. (She’s not.) Playing out against the background of Kimberly’s fairly predictable school success (she winds up going to Yale on full scholarship and then to Harvard medical school) are the stages of her development, which include interactions with Matt, her hunky Chinese-American boyfriend, who works at the factory, drops out of school and wants to provide for her; Curt, her hunky Anglo boyfriend, who’s dumb but sweet; and Annette, her loyal friend from the time they’re in sixth grade. Throughout the stress of adolescence, Kimberly must also negotiate the tension between her mother’s embarrassing old-world ways and the allurement of American culture.
A straightforward and pleasant, if somewhat predictable narrative, marred in part by an ending that too blatantly tugs at the heartstrings.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-756-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...
A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.).
Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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