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 novel of empathy and depth, to be read with slow savor.
Hazzard's most spacious fiction yet, spread over large expanses of time and situation that somehow remain intimate—a comic, social book that turns into a wise, sad one.
Caroline and Grace Bell, Australian orphan sisters, board after World War II at the home of a famous old English astronomer. Ted Tice, a young colleague of the famous man, falls in love with Caro (whose book this mainly is—excepting one luminous chapter in which an older Grace falls in love with her son's doctor). Caro, though, loves Paul Ivory, a playwright; and when he marries a lovelessly bitchy society woman (we later learn why), his betrayal feels so great that Caro can't properly bind the wound until she meets and marries a rich American with a social conscience, Adam Vail. After Adam's death in New York, Paul Ivory, his son dying of leukemia, calls on Caro to make a terrible confession—a murder by negligence, a witness (Ted Tice) silent all these years—that literally upends Caro's entire picture of her past, a whole life revised in an instant; Hazzard's finest stroke is making this true and real and horrible. How she does it is through a huge but lightsome charity toward the people in the book, as short or long as they come. A species of hyper-smart romantic fiction is avoided by the insistence not only on Venus' transit but on the wisdom of love, especially as women know it yet cannot keep it. And though the prose is at first a little daunting, unmodernly rich ("She was watching with some large feeling, less than love, in which approval and exasperation merged to a pang that Ted Tice should supply, in a little scene of varnished attitudes and systematic exchanges, the indispensable humanity"), once you get to know the characters, these Jamesian boluses dissolve.
A novel of empathy and depth, to be read with slow savor.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 1980
ISBN: 9780140107470
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1980
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.
Suspense queen Ware's (The Woman in Cabin 10, 2016, etc.) third novel in three years introduces four women who have been carrying a terrible secret since their boarding school days, a secret that is about to be literally unearthed.
Isa Wilde, happy in her life as a new mother, receives a text one morning that simply reads, I need you, and hours later, she boards a train bound for the coastal village of Salten with her infant daughter in tow. She has come at her friend Kate’s summons, and soon they are joined by two other women who received the same text, Thea and Fatima. Fifteen years earlier, all four were best friends at Salten House, sneaking off campus on the weekends to spend time with Kate’s father, an art teacher, and her handsome, mysterious brother, Luc. Their school days ended in tragedy and scandal, however, and the four haven’t been back to Salten since they were expelled. Now, a bone has been found in the marshes, and Kate has called the others back in a panic. They know more about the body than they should, but even they don’t know the truth. Ware’s third outing is just as full of psychological suspense as her earlier books, but there is a quietness about this one, a slower unraveling of tension and fear, that elevates it above her others. Though there's still a fair dash of drama, it doesn’t veer into the realm of melodrama, developing consistently with the characters and with their personalities and pasts. Isa is a sympathetic narrative voice though her obsession with the concerns of new parenthood may put some readers off.
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5600-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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