Instead, the truth becomes a canvas for a beautiful still-life portrait—and a masterpiece at that.
Roy’s mesmerizing debut explores the inner lives of a family of Indian immigrants who can never reveal their secrets.
Romola Mitra doesn’t tell her new husband, Avinash, what she found in a letter addressed to him. It’s too late for that—she’s already left Calcutta for the small Illinois town where Avinash is finishing his Ph.D. Romola now bottles a painful secret that seems destined to explode. Instead, it fizzles. Flashbacks to Romola’s hopeful youth in India contrast with quiet scenes of domesticity with Avinash and their son, Amit, all three forming a close-knit family without knowing each other at all. Avinash, whose first crush was on his male barber, has resorted to meeting men in anonymous chat rooms and gay clubs, while his wife daydreams about the film star she might have married had her parents approved. Amit grows up and moves to San Francisco without ever knowing the sacrifices his parents made. In refusing to buck the system, they challenge the very notion of freedom. In Calcutta, the Mitra family had servants; in the middle of America, Romola is confined to her box of an apartment with no car and not quite enough English to fully express herself. She and her extended family find freedom in transcendent moments. Forbidden to eat sweets, Amit’s great-grandmother hides jars of mango chutney under her mattress to have when she’s bedridden. Her recipe—and the tastes and smells it produces—follows Amit all the way to San Francisco years after she dies. Romola’s adventures are the most surreal, including a harrowing encounter with a McDonald’s cashier, a tussle with a bodyguard at a funeral and a singalong with a drag queen named Bang la Dish. For Avinash, what doesn’t happen is almost as important as what does: At times, his indiscretion leads him to heartache or danger, but it doesn’t ruin his life.
Instead, the truth becomes a canvas for a beautiful still-life portrait—and a masterpiece at that.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-898-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
This killer debut is both a thriller with a vivid setting and an insightful study of race, class, and obsession.
The death of a teenage vacationer on a fictional Caribbean island reverberates through many lives, particularly those of her 7-year-old sister and one of the workers at the resort.
“Look. A girl is walking down the sand.…As she walks, heads turn—young men, openly; older men, more subtly; older women, longingly.…This is Alison.” A dangerous froth of sexual tension escalates around Alison Thomas, visiting Saint X from the wealthy New York suburbs with her parents and little sister, Claire. Schaitkin evokes her fictional resort with sureness—“the long drive lined with perfectly vertical palm trees,” “the beach where lounge chairs are arranged in a parabola,” the scents of “frangipani and coconut sunscreen and the mild saline of equatorial ocean.” After the disaster, the focus shifts to Claire, who changes her name to Emily after her bereaved family moves to California but never escapes the shadow of the event. “I knew the exact day I outlived Alison. Eighteen years, three months, twelve days.” When she moves back East for a publishing job in New York City, she crosses paths with one of the resort employees her sister was partying with the night she died. These men were exonerated in the matter of Alison's death, but Clive Richardson was arrested for selling pot in the process; after prison, his life is so devastated that he immigrates to Manhattan. After Emily gets in Clive’s taxicab, her obsessive desire to know more about her sister’s death—which, by now, the reader fully shares—consumes her life. The complex point of view, shifting among an omniscient narrator, Emily's perspective in first person, Clive’s immigrant story in close third, plus brief testimonies from myriad minor characters, works brilliantly. Just as impressive are Schaitkin’s unflinching examinations of the roles of race, privilege, and human nature in the long-unfolding tragedy. Setting the story in a fictional place, collaged and verbally photoshopped from real Caribbean settings, is daring, but this writer is fearless, and her gamble pays off.
This killer debut is both a thriller with a vivid setting and an insightful study of race, class, and obsession.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21959-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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