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
In this new novella by the Nobel Prize-winner, a Colombian-village murder 20 years in the past is raked over, brooded upon, made into a parable: how an Arab living in the town was assassinated by the loutish twin Vicario brothers when their sister, a new bride, was rejected by her bridegroom—who discovered the girl's unchastity. Cast off, beaten, grilled, the girl eventually revealed the name of her corrupter—Santiago Nassar. And, though no one really believed her (Nassar was the least likely villain), the Arab was indeed killed: the drunken brothers broadcasted their intentions casually; they went so far as to sharpen their murder weapons—old pig-sticking knives—in the town market; and the town, universal witness to the intention, reacted with epic ambivalence—sure, at first, that such an injustice couldn't occur, yet also resigned to its inevitability. As in In Evil Hour (1979) and other works, then, what Garcia Marquez offers here is an orchestration of grim social realities—an awareness that seems vague at first, then coheres into a solid, pessimistic vision. But, while In Evil Hour threaded the message with wit, fanciful imagination, and storytelling flair (the traits which have made Garcia Marquez popular as well as honored), this new book seems crammed, airless, thinly diagrammatic. The theme of historical imperative comes across in a didactic, mechanistic fashion: "He never thought it legitimate," G-M says of one character, ironically, "that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so there should be the untramelled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold." (Also, the novella's structural lines are uncomfortably close to those of Robert Pinget's Libera Me Domine.) So, while the recent Nobel publicity will no doubt generate added interest, this is minor, lesser Garcia Marquez: characteristic themes illustrated without the often-characteristic charm and dazzle.
Pub Date: April 15, 1983
ISBN: 140003471X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.
A young man dying of AIDS returns to his Ohio hometown, where people think homosexuality is a sin and the disease is divine punishment.
Brian left Chester when he was 18, seeking freedom to be who he was in New York City. Now, in 1986, he’s 24, his partner and virtually all of their friends are dead, and he’s moving into the disease’s late stages. “He turned his back on his family to live a life of sin and he’s sick because of it,” thinks his mother, Sharon; nonetheless she says yes when Brian asks if he can come home after years of estrangement. His father, Travis, insists they must keep Brian’s illness and sexuality a secret; he makes Sharon set aside tableware and bedclothes exclusively for their son and wash them separately wearing gloves. Sickels (The Evening Hour, 2012) doesn’t gloss over the shame Brian’s family feels nor the astonishing cruelty of their friends and neighbors when word gets out. Brian’s ejection from the local swimming pool is the first in a series of increasingly ugly incidents: vicious phone calls, hate mail to the local newspapers, graffiti on the family garage, a gunshot through the windshield of his father’s car. Grandmother Lettie is Brian’s only open defender, refusing to speak to friends who ostracize him and boycotting the diner that denied him service. Younger sister Jess, taunted at school, wishes he’d never come home and tells him so. This unvarnished portrait of what people are capable of when gripped by ignorance and fear is relieved slightly by a few cracks in the facade of the town’s intolerance, some moments of kindness or at least faint regret as Brian’s health worsens over the summer and fall. Sharon and Travis both eventually acknowledge they have failed their son; she makes some amends while he can only grieve. Sickels’ characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel.
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-62-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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