A lurid exploration of passion, agency, and the role of art in self-actualization.
In D’Stair’s novel, a listless mother finds an object of obsession while on a guided tour of Italy.
Middle-aged Helen Bonaparte is quietly starving, but she can’t articulate what will sate her. She arrives in Venice while on a weeklong guided tour of Italy’s great cities and artistic history under no romantic illusions about where she is or who she’s with—she finds Venice “grey” and “unfortunate,” while her fellow Americans “inspire loathing.” Providing welcome distraction amid her vapid company and the ostentatious design of the city is Marieke, the tour guide, who’s young and beautiful and Dutch. Helen’s fascination is immediate: “My body is pierced with Marieke.” From the first dinner they share in Venice, Helen’s hyper-fixation intensifies, and her engagement with her fellow travelers and the cities they traverse (not to mention her relationship with her partner, Marcel, and their two children) begins to pale in the face of this new erotic fixation. She has enough self-awareness to shield her darker compulsions—Helen is careful not to look at or speak with Marieke for too long, and she befriends a fellow tour mate, Richard, to obscure her singular focus and desire. But as the group visits more cities, monuments, and museums (nearly every chapter denotes a new city and day), she becomes emboldened (inching toward frantic) as she reads into every touch and gloats over the symbolism in gestures as simple as sipping from a coffee cup. Is this erotic spell mutual, or is Helen losing herself to fantasy?
Before Helen departed for Italy, Marcel had recommended she take the novel Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith (author of queer, psychological novels such as The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt) for company. Marcel’s reasoning is that the novel’s story takes place in the same towns; this can be read as a meta “wink” at D’Stair drawing inspiration from Highsmith’s interrogations of identity and existential crises amid picturesque backdrops. The novel Helen brings along involves a murder, and readers will find echoes of Ripley’s title character’s obsession with a beautiful young man and the escapist potential of his lifestyle in how Helen pines for Marieke and in the story’s mounting potential for violence. Helen notes again and again how little she cares for any of her tour mates, not even bothering to learn their names (aside from Richard’s). Her deepest conversations and moments of introspection that aren’t filtered through the lens of Marieke come from experiencing the art around her. The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, for example, offers a reprieve from her general cynicism, allowing her to ruminate and perhaps even believe in the power of art’s influence, if only briefly: “What does it matter whether it is truly real or some burgeoning capitalist’s abomination. Only the romance matters now, the symbol, the truth not in the material but in the mind of the observer.” And this elusive romance, for better or worse, eventually drives Helen toward her conclusion.
A lurid exploration of passion, agency, and the role of art in self-actualization.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781088017807
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Late Marriage Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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