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
A well-paced page-turner with a sour ending.
Perfect wife, perfect life, right? Not so fast.
Delaney (Believe Me, 2018, etc.) returns with a domestic artificial-intelligence thriller. Five years after an accident, Abbie wakes up covered in bandages and surrounded by machines. The catch? This isn’t the real Abbie; this Abbie is a cobot, or “companion robot.” The real Abbie—a wild, beautiful artist and devoted mother—was never found. Her husband, Tim, a Steve Jobs type complete with God complex and anger issues, owns Scott Robotics, a cutting-edge Silicon Valley darling. Tim has spent half a decade and an enormous amount of resources to bring his wife back. The novel is told from the alternating perspectives of Abbie the cobot, who propels the novel forward, and Scott Robotics employees, who provide a Greek chorus of exposition. Cobot Abbie doesn’t just look like her namesake: She has her thoughts, memories, and voice; feels maternal toward Danny, her autistic son; and begins to learn the original Abbie's secrets. But she also is her own person—well, robot. The tension between the inherited and innate is portrayed nicely, and the ethical questions surrounding Abbie are interesting. If robots are capable of feelings, empathy, and pain, should they have the same rights as humans? If not, how should they be treated? There’s a particularly heartbreaking scene when cobot Abbie makes a bouillabaisse—without senses of taste or smell—and uses rotten fish bones. With shame and despair, Abbie thinks, “Your stock—your beautiful, elaborate, saffron-infused fumet—was poisoned from the start.” To add insult to injury: Artificial smelling technology exists but Tim has cut corners. A fitting metaphor. The twist—or, rather, twists—is genuinely surprising and quite disturbing, but it feels like a slap in the face by taking away what little agency had been given to the female characters.
A well-paced page-turner with a sour ending.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9674-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wonderful fun and very moving: it’s a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.
After two self-indulgent detours, Atkinson proves that her Whitbread Award–winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996), was no fluke with a novel about three interconnected mysteries.
They seem totally unrelated at first to private detective Jackson Brodie, hired by separate individuals in Cambridge, England, to investigate long-dormant cases. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared from a tent in her family’s backyard in 1970; 34 years later, her sisters Amelia and Julia discover Olivia’s stuffed toy in their recently deceased father’s study and want Jackson to find out what he had to do with the disappearance. Theo Wyre’s beloved 18-year-old daughter Laura was murdered by a knife-wielding lunatic in 1994, and he too hires Jackson to crack this unsolved murder. Michelle was also 18 when she went to jail in 1979 for killing her husband with an ax while their infant daughter wailed in the playpen; she vanished after serving her time, but Shirley Morrison asks Jackson to find, not her sister Michelle, but the niece she promised to raise, then was forced to hand over to grandparents. The detective, whose bitter ex-wife uses Jackson’s profound love for their eight-year-old daughter to torture him, finds all these stories of dead and/or missing girls extremely unsettling; we learn toward the end why the subject of young women in peril is particularly painful for him. Atkinson has always been a gripping storyteller, and her complicated narrative crackles with the earthy humor, vibrant characterizations, and shrewd social observations that enlivened her first novel but were largely swamped by postmodern game-playing in Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000). Here, she crafts a compulsive page-turner that looks deep into the heart of sadness, cruelty, and loss, yet ultimately grants her charming p.i. (and most of the other appealingly offbeat characters, including one killer) a chance at happiness and some measure of reconciliation with the past.
Wonderful fun and very moving: it’s a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-74040-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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