A compact, deftly constructed novella that traces with wry precision the interrelationships among a Connecticut townful of midsummer night’s dreamers on a humid and mystery-laden evening “when the almost full moon wakens sleepers in their beds.” Fourteen-year-old Laura Engstrom leaves her bed and drowsily wanders her neighborhood, the unsuspecting cynosure of adult admiring eyes. Haverstraw, a frustrated middle-aged writer, keeps his regular late-night assignation with the older woman who is his unlikely intellectual companion. Lonely Janet Manning fantasizes a handsome lover’s reappearance. A “girl gang” of teenagers who break into houses and commit acts of innocuous vandalism are in fact welcomed in by “the woman who lives alone.” Natural laws are suspended: an aroused “moon goddess” hungrily takes the virginity of a sleeping boy; toys and dolls come to life, including a department store mannequin who’s adored by a drunken loner, and the mismatched commedia dell—arte puppets Columbine and Pierrot. The considerable pleasure bestowed by this slim tale lies in the delicate recombinations of these and other figures, and in Millhauser’s ingenuity in uniting, then, parting, Meanwhile, a lyrical narrative overvoice summarizes the night’s events with memorable images (“the moon is a white blossom in a blue garden”) and resonant phrasing (“the lovely summer life of yards”). And a wonderfully moving coda in effect blesses the story’s several “characters” as they variously awaken from, or imperfectly recall, their enchanted evening. Some will find all this insufferably fey; readers who don’t will be richly, magically rewarded. Millhauser (The Knife Thrower, 1998, etc.) is a stylist and visionary whose fiction dances on the very edge of preciosity without ever falling into it. He’s also that greater rarity in American fiction: the writer who keeps getting better and better.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60516-X
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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 raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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