Pastan (This Side of Married, 2004) is strong on domestic despair, but the story of the woman who lets a man take the credit...
A literary historian feels drawn to a 19th-century wife and mother who sacrificed all for her man.
A driven academic, Jane Levitsky loves her infant daughter Maisie and husband Billy, but most of her intellectual and emotional energy flows toward her research into the 19th-century Russian novelist Grigory Karkov and his wife Masha. Even during childbirth, Jane’s thoughts drift to Masha, whose diaries fascinate Jane as much as Karkov’s novels. Jane gets a prestigious assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin, where the eminent Karkov scholar Otto Sigelman has just retired. Increasingly obsessed with her research and chafing at her domestic responsibilities, Jane hires a graduate student she is advising to be Maisie’s live-in babysitter. Meanwhile, Sigelman, who still comes regularly to his office next to Jane’s, disparages her emphasis on Masha’s importance as Karkov’s muse, but Jane begins to suspect Grigory may have lifted entire diary entries from his wife. On a trip to Chicago’s Newberry Library, Jane finds a tantalizing letter from Masha that may shed new light on her role in Karkov’s writing. But before Jane can thoroughly digest the letter, Billy calls to say Maisie is in the hospital. Jane must abort her trip, and by the time she gets back to Chicago, the letter has disappeared. Sigelman has stolen it. She steals it back. She also discovers that taken-for-granted Billy has slept with the babysitter. He moves out. She tracks down Karkov’s last descendent, who gives her a startling manuscript: Before her death, Masha wrote a novel Grigory claimed as his own with her blessing. Jane realizes her own life is out of balance. In an improbably happy ending, Jane reconciles with Billy, has a second child and begins her book on Masha.
Pastan (This Side of Married, 2004) is strong on domestic despair, but the story of the woman who lets a man take the credit for her artistic achievement never comes to life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101369-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In Tyler's latest testing of the strangulating tugs and miraculous stretch of familial and marital ties, a middle-aged Baltimore couple (inexplicably linked, like so many of Tyler's lovers) take a one-day's detour-clogged trip to a funeral. It's a circuit of comic bumps and heartbreaking plunges that takes them home again to dwindling hope and options, but also to the certainty of love. Maggie Moran, 48, a nursing-home aide (although years ago, her purse-lipped mother had demanded college), was certainly a "klutz." Everyone, including Maggie's "closed-in, isolate" husband Ira, thought so. Maggie had a "knobby, fumbling way of progressing through life" feeling "as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus. . .and if she made the smallest adjustment everything would settle perfectly into place." Maggie had indeed "adjusted" the focus of young Fiona, pregnant by Maggie and Ira's failure-bound son Jesse, at the very door of the abortion clinic (surrounded by amateur picketers). Through some hardworking, warmhearted lying, Maggie had forged Jesse and Fiona's marriage; and Maggie's "breathing lessons," coaching Fiona in pregnancy, had as much control over her granddaughter's birth as all Maggie's efforts to prevent the break-up of a young marriage with no connective tissue. Now Maggie is bent on retrieving Fiona and granddaughter back to Jesse—another Moran who's "thrown away his future," like Ira, who had dreams of being a doctor, but was hobbled by his own family, whom he loved and hated. (Could it be, however, in the words of a splintery geezer, netted by Maggie on the highway, that "what you throw away is all that really counts"?) Before the visit to Fiona, there's the funeral, and middle-aged classmates watch silent movies of their young selves. The camera had recorded Maggie and Ira as "ordinary"—in the way a sea shell marks genus but not the undulations of existence. Once home, Maggie's carousel of hopes stops, and she cries out: "What are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?" But Ira, wiser, shrewder, offers and welcomes love. A seriocomic journey in which, as always, underlying the character-rooted, richly comic turns, is Tyler's affectionate empathy for those who detour—and "practice life" to "get it right.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1988
ISBN: 0345485572
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
Deep and deeply funny.
A surreal love story about the courtship between a living woman and a dead man.
Rachel is a dark-haired, red-lipped reference librarian living in Brooklyn for whom romance, so far, has been a general disappointment. “I have fallen in love with my own daydreams,” she explains, “and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” But the men disappoint, in the end. “It was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream,” she says, but rather that the men were too weak to “withstand the daydream’s reality.” And then, at the bus stop, she sees Thomas and becomes fascinated by this electric, sad-seeming man. He notices her, too, drawn to her perpetual air of alert discomfort, “like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey,” and one Saturday, she follows him onto his bus instead of her own and their courtship begins. (“Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging,” she observes, in one of the book’s many delightfully blunt and correct observations.) The problem, of course, is that Thomas is dead. But because of an “institutional error”—the institution being death—he is “insufficiently dead” and so must be temporarily “re-manifested,” returned to a body that “exactly resembles” his own until “the Office” is able to “complete the procedures necessary to process” his arrival. They have issued a set of instructions designed to help him navigate this new phase of his not-quite-existence, all designed to prevent him from incurring regrets. “Sexual contact” is not advised in this state; it is “the most efficient way to incur regrets.” And also, his body is beginning to dissolve. It is a plot that could be—that should be—unbearably twee, oppressively quirky, in love with its own melancholy. Instead, Bonnaffons’ (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) first full-length novel is a rare pleasure: a philosophical rom-com too weird, too bodily, too precise, too fun to get bogged down in trembling sentiment.
Deep and deeply funny.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-51616-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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