After her mediocre second novel (The Time of Her Life, 1984), Dew resurrects the Howells family from her stunning debut, Dale Loves Sophie to Death (1981), and proves, once again, that common sense and elegant prose can transform ordinary lives into compelling fiction. Since last heard from, the Howells (``the world's last happy family'') have endured their share of tragedy. The death of son Toby in a car accident remains ``unresolved'' for the rest of the family six years later, as oldest son David prepares to leave for Harvard. Martin and Dinah, now in their 40s, spend this summer sorting out their emotional lives as parents—and as people of impeccable honor, manners, and good taste. Which, in Dew's view, doesn't mean they're heavily repressed. These are well-meaning, liberalish parents who enjoy life in their college town (a thinly disguised Williamstown, Mass.), where Martin teaches and Dinah maintains ``the physical equilibrium of their domestic arrangements.'' Dinah's unconditional and overwhelming love for her children doesn't prevent her from mothering those who stray onto her always open hearth. This summer, Netta Breckenridge, a young, hyperintense philosopher, wanders into view, along with her sad little daughter. While Dinah frets over Martin's fascination with the brilliant instructor, she fails to realize the obvious—her little boy David is now a young man with intellectual and sexual appetites of his own. As Dinah fears the various threats to her admittedly arbitrary domestic order, Martin tries to make peace with the boy who inadvertently killed his son. Throughout here, Dinah rewrites a letter solicited by Harvard's Dean of Students about her son. It's a rather trite way of marking her progress through this summer of ``letting go''—and unworthy of the more profound insight into parenthood that distinguishes this emotionally precise novel. Despite some glaring loose ends—will we hear from the Howells again?—this is a defiantly small fiction and, in its way, an extraordinary tale of how self-identity emerges from the bonds of family.
Pub Date: March 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-10781-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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