A subtle novel that’s a glowing testament to the enduring power of ideas.
Debut author Post crafts a whimsical tale about an academic’s unexpected walk upon a road less traveled.
Kate Brown, a literature professor who’s an expert on the author Herman Melville, is on the path to academic glory. Harvard University plucked the young Midwesterner from Northwestern to give her a tenure-track position. Then her college’s dean peremptorily informs her that she’ll be filling in for a professor on sabbatical, teaching the freshman seminar on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Kate is taken aback by this development, thinking it’s daunting “for someone who hasn’t experienced the outdoors, except through the windows of a library these past four years, to teach a book about the joys of living in the midst of nature.” However, Kate immerses herself in the topic and is soon aided by one of her students, Heather Channing, who comes from a region called Walden North in rural Vermont. When Kate visits there, Thoreau’s message resonates with her: “Everything is interconnected here. She took a long, slow deep breath to inhale this new insight—a tranquil wholeness.” She soon finds herself torn between two men (and two lifestyles): roguish fellow professor Charles Blake Winthrop Prentiss, the epitome of Harvard snobbishness; and Heather’s father, William, a stoic educator who walked away from Harvard to become the seeming mirror image of Thoreau himself. The novel believably recounts Kate’s transformation from a scholar wed to the theoretical to a person craving all the real-life experiences that a simpler existence has to offer. Post’s characters are well-drawn, although it quickly becomes obvious where her own allegiances lie; after all, she’s a former teacher who lives in a New England setting not unlike Walden North. Her use of italicized passages from Walden in the text seems a little twee and heavy-handed, but it doesn’t greatly diminish the enjoyment of her tale. Overall, her message, emblazoned in Kate’s philosophical journey, will make readers stop and reflect.
A subtle novel that’s a glowing testament to the enduring power of ideas.Pub Date: June 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9961357-6-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.
A young New York woman figures there’s nothing wrong with existence that a fistful of prescriptions and months of napping wouldn’t fix.
Moshfegh’s prickly fourth book (Homesick for Another World, 2017, etc.) is narrated by an unnamed woman who’s decided to spend a year “hibernating.” She has a few conventional grief issues. (Her parents are both dead, and they’re much on her mind.) And if she’s not mentally ill, she’s certainly severely maladjusted socially. (She quits her job at an art gallery in obnoxious, scatological fashion.) But Moshfegh isn’t interested in grief or mental illness per se. Instead, she means to explore whether there are paths to living that don’t involve traditional (and wearying) habits of consumption, production, and relationships. To highlight that point, most of the people in the narrator's life are offbeat or provisional figures: Reva, her well-meaning but shallow former classmate; Trevor, a boyfriend who only pursues her when he’s on the rebound; and Dr. Tuttle, a wildly incompetent doctor who freely gives random pill samples and presses one drug, Infermiterol, that produces three-day blackouts. None of which is the stuff of comedy. But Moshfegh has a keen sense of everyday absurdities, a deadpan delivery, and such a well-honed sense of irony that the narrator’s predicament never feels tragic; this may be the finest existential novel not written by a French author. (Recovering from one blackout, the narrator thinks, “What had I done? Spent a spa day then gone out clubbing?...Had Reva convinced me to go ‘enjoy myself’ or something just as idiotic?”) Checking out of society the way the narrator does isn’t advisable, but there’s still a peculiar kind of uplift to the story in how it urges second-guessing the nature of our attachments while revealing how hard it is to break them.
A nervy modern-day rebellion tale that isn’t afraid to get dark or find humor in the darkness.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52211-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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