A short, insightful reflection on the expatriate experience.
Carroll’s debut novel, a character study of two Americans teaching English in rural China, gracefully contrasts idealism and cynicism.
Epigraphs from W. Somerset Maugham and Paul Bowles evoke two precedents for this contemplative work on being a purposeless outsider. But the greatest debt is to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Carroll’s plot follows the uneasy relationship between two men, one older and jaded, the other young and idealistic. Thomas Guillard, a Minnesotan in his 60s, arrives in Ningyuan to work at an English language school. He has neither the passion nor affinity for teaching but persists halfheartedly—between bouts of drunkenness. Twenty-something Daniel, conversely, speaks Mandarin fluently and is popular with his students, especially enthusiastic Bella. “Daniel’s motive for moving abroad had been to reach out and learn something from the world,” which accounts for his embrace of new experiences, whether patronizing a brothel or sampling dog paw as the guest of honor at a holiday feast. There are no quotation marks, and the close third-person narration moves easily between Daniel’s and Guillard’s perspectives. The latter’s bad-tempered xenophobia emerges as he notices “the Chinese squatting…and eyeing him like children” in a bus station like “some cattle fair” and observes “the moon had risen—what a fat and ugly bitch.” Yet sympathy goes solely to Daniel, perhaps partially for autobiographical reasons—Carroll, too, taught English in China. No inner doubt or vulnerability humanizes Guillard, and the narrative unsubtly cements Daniel’s judgment: Guillard “had proven to be arrogant, lewd, and racist.” Guillard’s Scrooge-like persona doesn’t even lift for Christmas Day, when—in the novel’s standout sequence—Bella cooks him a duck. Never a romantic prospect for either man, Bella is enough of a desirable object to allow trumped-up sexual harassment charges to drive one of them away in a slightly forced plot twist. Set over one academic year, the novel has a clear mission it fulfills admirably while recalling W.G. Sebald and Ben Lerner with its picture of befuddled foreignness. A pleasingly inconclusive ending paints home and new destinations as equally appealing.
A short, insightful reflection on the expatriate experience.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941758-45-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Inkshares
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.
In Japan, a daughter explores the crime of passion that took her mother’s life.
Sumiko was just 7 when her mother died and her father moved away; she was raised by her grandfather, who has always maintained that her mother was killed in a car accident. Twenty years later, she answers a phone call meant for him from a prison administrator with information about inmate Kaitarō Nakamura; when the caller realizes whom she is speaking with, she hangs up. With just this detail, Sumiko begins an obsessive quest. She turns up an article headlined “WAKARESASEYA AGENT GOES TOO FAR?” from which she learns that Kaitarō Nakamura was an agent in the “marriage breakup” industry. He was hired by her father to seduce her mother in order to provide grounds for divorce. Nakamura claims that he and her mother had fallen in love and were about to start a new life together. When Sumiko visits Nakamura's defense attorney, the woman hands over all her files and videotaped interviews with her client. Weaving through the story of Sumiko’s search and her recollections of her childhood is the story of her mother and her lover, from the moment he pretended to meet her accidentally at the market and moving inexorably to the murder scene. Scott is a Singaporean British writer born and raised in Southeast Asia; her debut is inspired by a 2010 case in Tokyo and based on years of research. The book proceeds slowly, lingering on enjoyable details of Japanese landscape and food but perhaps not adding enough new information to maintain the level of interest set by the sensational details in the first pages.
An unusual and stylish story of love and murder—less a mystery than a study of emotions and cultural mores.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54470-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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