Autobiographical first novel about manic-depression. Given that he takes as his subject here the murky corners of the mind, Zwiren is remarkably clear. The story begins with the record of an ongoing episode, in the summer of 1991, as Zwiren walks through Manhattan, deftly exposing the reader to the narrator's mercurial obsessions—with numbers, with colors, with sex, but most of all with God. He thinks he's Jesus. The opening episode ends in an emergency room. Then Zwiren flashes back to the winter of 1982, when as a scholarship student he tries to negotiate college for the first time. A simple episode in a bookstore is illustrative: Zwiren stands in line, changes his mind and gets out of line, gets in line, fears the line, fantasizes about the line, runs from the bookstore. Delusions of grandeur coalesce with rank paranoia as Zwiren takes the reader through the 1980s; sometimes he functions reasonably well, holding down jobs and even entering into brief relationships, but sooner or later reality slips away from him and he's back on the ward. Zwiren ends his account in the summer of 1990; enrolled in a support group, and taking various medications, he can mostly manage, but he has had to accept the fact that his condition is incurable. His novel, meanwhile, is repetitive, boring, heartbreaking, and quite beautifully written. That is, while the narrative tends to circle around the same points over and over again, Zwiren spins image after striking image, all the more remarkable for being his authentic view of the world rather than some literary experiment: ``The insides of my eyelids are unsafe,'' he notes in passing; in another passage, attempting to explain the allure sleep holds for him, he writes that ``the aim is to get to the threshold of sleep, a gluey sleep, a cheese melt.'' A must for anyone interested in the nature of mental illness as seen from the inside.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-56478-130-5
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.
A heartland novel that evokes the possibility of everyday miracles.
The third novel by Wisconsin author Butler (Beneath the Bonfire, 2015, etc.) shows that he knows this terrain inside out, in terms of tone and theme as well as geography. Nothing much happens in this small town in western Wisconsin, not far from the river that serves as the border with Minnesota, which attracts some tourism in the summer but otherwise seems to exist outside of time. The seasons change, but any other changes are probably for the worse—local businesses can’t survive the competition of big-box stores, local kids move elsewhere when they grow up, local churches see their congregations dwindle. Sixty-five-year-old Lyle Hovde and his wife, Peg, have lived here all their lives; they were married in the same church where he was baptized and where he’s sure his funeral will be. His friends have been friends since boyhood; he had the same job at an appliance store where he fixed what they sold until the store closed. Then he retired, or semiretired, as he found a new routine as the only employee at an apple orchard, where the aging owners are less concerned with making money than with being good stewards of the Earth. The novel is like a favorite flannel shirt, relaxed and comfortable, well-crafted even as it deals with issues of life and death, faith and doubt that Lyle somehow takes in stride. He and Peg lost their only child when he was just a few months old, a tragedy which shook his faith even as he maintained his rituals. He and Peg subsequently adopted a baby daughter, Shiloh, through what might seem in retrospect like a miracle (it certainly didn’t seem to involve any of the complications and paperwork that adoptions typically involve). Shiloh was a rebellious child who left as soon as she could and has now returned home with her 5-year-old son, Isaac. Grandparenting gives Lyle another chance to experience what he missed with his own son, yet drama ensues when Shiloh falls for a charismatic evangelist who might be a cult leader (and he’s a stranger to these parts, so he can’t be much good). Though the plot builds toward a dramatic climax, it ends with more of a quiet epiphany.
The novelist loves this land and these characters, with their enduring values amid a way of life that seems to be dying.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-246971-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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