Now, in a richly textured but emotionally cool novel, Miller (The Distinguished Guest, 1995, etc. ) limns a fall from grace and the hard climb back to redemption as a woman tempted to take a timeout from her marriage almost destroys all the good things in her life. Jo Becker, a veterinarian in a small Massachusetts town, is intensely aware of all those seemingly inconsequential yet important daily habits—taking walks with the family dogs, cooking dinner, going fishing—that form part of the marital glue. The mother of three grownup daughters, and married to local pastor Daniel, fiftyish Jo considers herself fortunate until Eli Mayhew, new in town, brings his ailing dog to her and reminds her of their shared past. In the weeks that follow, as she prepares for Thanksgiving and Christmas, she recalls her failed first marriage and her flight from her parents to a new identity and life in Boston (where she and Eli had once been housemates). After a mutual friend’s grisly and unsolved murder, Jo returned to her family, became a vet, and met Daniel. But as she starts to reminisce with Eli, now a distinguished scientist, she finds herself yearning for her old freedom—and beginning an affair with Eli. A horrifying admission frightens her into offering a parallel confession of her own to her husband. Terribly hurt, he finds it hard to forgive her, but the marriage slowly begins to mend in spite of it. Jo, conscious of what it will cost her to regain his trust and love, tries “to accept the changes I made when I didn’t intend to.” Despite being a finely tuned take on a good marriage suddenly imperiled by the vagaries of the heart, this latest from the popular Miller is more a perceptive study than absorbing story. Both Joe and Daniel—never very credible to begin with—remain one- dimensional ideas rather than full-blooded characters.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40112-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her...
Love and ambition clash in a novel depicting China's turbulent 1980s.
Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father. Liya grew up with a single mother, the brilliant but troubled physicist Su Lan, who refused to talk about Liya's missing father. Mother and daughter grew increasingly estranged as Su Lan obsessed over her theoretical research. Complicating Liya's search for truth is the fact she was born in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the very night of the government crackdown on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. Su Lan changed Liya's birth year on her papers to obscure this fact in America. The reader is meant to wonder if Liya's father perhaps died during the crackdown. However, this is not a novel about the idealism of the student reform movement or even the decisions behind the government's use of lethal force. Instead Jin focuses on the personalities of three students: the young Su Lan as well as Zhang Bo and Li Yongzong, two of her high school classmates who were rivals for her affection. The novel shifts point of view and jumps back and forth in time, obscuring vital pieces of information from the reader in order to prolong the mystery. Not all the plot contrivances make sense, but Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time. The title refers to the thoughts of a nurse, musing about the similarities that she sees between the Tiananmen student demonstrators and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution: "A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks."
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her ambition.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293595-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.
Two mysterious quests form the core of Murakami’s absorbing seventh novel, whose encyclopedic breadth recalls his earlier successes, A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997).
In the first of two parallel narratives, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura drops out of school and leaves the Tokyo home he shares with his artist-sculptor father, to seek the mother and sister who left them when Kafka was four years old. Traveling to the small town of Takamatsu, he spends his days at a free library, reconnects with a resourceful older girl who becomes his de facto mentor, and begins to reenact the details of a mysterious “incident” from more than 60 years ago. In 1944, a group of 16 schoolchildren inexplicably “lost consciousness” during an outing in a rural mountain area. Only one of them, Satoru Nakata, emerged from the incident damaged—and it’s he who, decades later, becomes the story’s second protagonist: a childlike, scarcely articulate, mentally challenged sexagenarian who is supported by a possibly guilty government’s “sub city” and possesses the ability to hold conversations (charmingly funny ones) with cats. With masterly skill and considerable subtlety, Murakami gradually plaits together the experiences and fates of Kafka and Nakata, underscoring their increasingly complex symbolic significance with several dazzling subplots and texts: a paternal prophecy echoing the Oedipus legend (from which Kafka also seeks escape); a faux-biblical occurrence in which things that ought not to be in the skies are raining down from them; the bizarre figures of a whore devoted to Hegel’s philosophy; and an otherworldly pimp whose sartorial affectations cloak his true menacing nature; a ghostly forest into which Russian soldiers inexplicably disappear; and—in glancing allusions to Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki—a clever homage to that author’s beguiling 1905 fantasy, I Am a Cat. Murakami is of course himself an immensely reader-friendly novelist, and never has he offered more enticing fare than this enchantingly inventive tale.
A masterpiece, entirely Nobel-worthy.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4366-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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