A feverish portrait of a mind in crisis, echoed in some overly fragmented storytelling.
A poet reckons with emotional stability after his lover’s death, with a few cameos from the spiritual world.
Jacob, like many characters in Alameddine’s oeuvre (An Unnecessary Woman, 2014, etc.), is highly literate, Middle Eastern, gay, and tormented: as the story opens, he's checking himself into a San Francisco psychiatric clinic because he's “having hallucinations, hearing Satan’s voice again.” News of another drone strike in his mother’s native Yemen hasn’t helped his sanity, but his central despair is the inability to shake the loss of his friends and partner during the height of the AIDS crisis. The novel’s fractured narrative captures the variety of coping mechanisms Jacob has tried: he recalls visits to S&M dungeons, delivers irreverent and satirical rants about politics and culture (“if I hear one more stanza eulogizing the scent of orange blossoms in Palestine, I will buy a gun, I swear”), and recalls his peripatetic childhood separated from his parents. Alameddine adds a mystical layer to these memories in sections where Satan (presumably a projection of Jacob’s anxieties) holds court with Death and various saints to prod Jacob to continue his self-loathing. As in An Unnecessary Woman, Alameddine is excellent at weaving literary references into his storytelling, and his set pieces have a sardonic cast that captures Jacob’s struggle to make sense of a world overflowing with HIV and innocent war victims; one digression is an extended boy-meets-drone fable. That said, the novel’s continuous shifts into different rhetorical gears risk making the novel feel almost centerless, or at least distant from the core story of Jacob’s stint in the clinic. Nobody could reasonably recommend that Alameddine restrict his limber imagination, but his swoops from dour to catty to fablelike to earthbound can be jarring.
A feverish portrait of a mind in crisis, echoed in some overly fragmented storytelling.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2576-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Collins invokes both Voltaire and Defoe here, and she forges an unlikely but sadly harmonic connection with both these...
There’s betrayal, depravity, pseudoscience, forbidden love, drug addiction, white supremacy, and, oh yes, a murder mystery with tightly wound knots to unravel.
The citizenry of 1826 London has worked itself into near apoplexy over the sensational trial of “The Mulatta Murderess,” aka Frances Langton, a Jamaican servant accused of brutally stabbing her white employers to death. Though caught on the night of the murders covered with blood, Frances cannot remember what happened and thus cannot say whether or not she is guilty. “For God’s sake, give me something I can save your neck with,” her lawyer pleads. And so Frannie, who, despite having been born into slavery, became adept at reading and writing, tries to find her own way to the truth the only way she can: By writing her life’s story from its beginnings on a West Indian plantation called Paradise whose master, John Langton, is a vicious sadist. He uses Frannie for sex and as a “scribe” taking notes on his hideous experiments into racial difference using skulls, blood, and even skin samples. After a fire destroys much of his plantation, Langton takes Frannie to London and makes her a gift to George Benham, an urbane scientist engaged in the same dubious race-science inquiries. Frannie’s hurt over her abandonment is soon dispelled by her fascination with Benham’s French-born wife, Marguerite, a captivating beauty whose lively wit and literary erudition barely conceal despondency that finds relief in bottles of laudanum. A bond forms between mistress and servant that swells and tightens into love, leading to a tempest of misunderstanding, deceit, jealousy, and, ultimately, death. Collins’ debut novel administers a bold and vibrant jolt to both the gothic and historical fiction genres, embracing racial and sexual subtexts that couldn’t or wouldn’t have been imagined by its long-ago practitioners. Her evocations of early-19th-century London and antebellum Jamaica are vivid and, at times, sensuously graphic. Most of all, she has created in her title character a complex, melancholy, and trenchantly observant protagonist; too conflicted in motivation, perhaps, to be considered a heroine but as dynamic and compelling as any character conceived by a Brontë sister.
Collins invokes both Voltaire and Defoe here, and she forges an unlikely but sadly harmonic connection with both these enlightenment heroes in her gripping, groundbreaking debut.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285189-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Weirdly compelling and compellingly weird.
A story of taxidermy, political intrigue, and love between men from the author of The Convalescent (2009).
The story begins at the beginning—or close enough. It begins with the birth—or close enough—of our planet. Several eons pass over the next few pages until a Victorian naturalist traveling in Africa encounters his first aardvark. Then another story begins, and in this story, “you”—these sections are narrated in the second person—are an up-and-coming young Republican legislator with a Ronald Reagan fetish. These two stories become intertwined when an aardvark specimen Sir Richard Ostlet sent to his friend and lover Titus Downing, a taxidermist, is delivered to Alexander Paine Wilson’s D.C. town house. As both narratives unfold, it becomes clear that Wilson and Downing have a great deal in common. The taxidermist is compelled to be circumspect about his relationship with Ostlet because what they do together is an actual crime in 19th-century England. For Wilson, coming out is impossible not only because of his political party, but also because he doesn’t even define himself as gay. Yes, he has frequent and very enjoyable sexual encounters with a philanthropist named Greg Tampico, but they’re just two straight guys who happen to enjoy sex with other men. The aardvark serves as a sort of intermediary between these two men and their lovers. Resurrecting this strange beast allows Downing to stay connected with Ostlet even after Ostlet has abandoned him and married a woman. When a FedEx truck dumps this selfsame aardvark on Wilson’s doorstep, he sees it as a message from Greg—one that the congressman will spend most of the novel struggling to decipher. In addition to providing a lot of detail about the art of taxidermy, Anthony offers meditations on the interconnectedness of all things. There are also ghosts and Nazis, in case all that isn’t enough.
Weirdly compelling and compellingly weird.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53615-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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