A novel still in search of itself.
Cooper’s bifurcated follow-up to Some of the Parts (2002) musters its scant cohesiveness from a touchingly confused search for identity.
The first part forms a tidy family saga involving the Lipshitz clan, Russian Jews fleeing pogroms in Kishinev, disembarking in New York on December 17, 1907, and losing one of their sons while waiting in the immigration line. Five-year-old Reuven is blond and doesn’t look like a Jew; his mother Esther insists to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which promises to find him. The family drops anchor for months on the Lower East Side to wait for news, but eventually heads out to start a new life in Amarillo, Texas, where Esther’s brother Avi has moved. The Lipshitzes prosper, but Reuven is never found. A psychic tells Esther that her son will become famous and then endure a terrible tragedy; she convinces herself that Charles Lindbergh is really Reuven and writes dire warnings to the aviator and his wife for years before their son is kidnapped in 1932. The final section leaps to 2002. The Lipshitzes’ great-grandchild, a writer and rapper in New York who shares the author’s name and ambiguous sexuality, is reeling from the news that Mom and Dad have died in a head-on collision. T Cooper the character must return to Amarillo after many years away to help druggie brother Sammy plan the funeral and sort out family effects. T Cooper the author attempts to tie together the novel’s schizophrenic parts by having the modern protagonist painstakingly assemble a miniature model of Lindbergh’s plane, Spirit of St. Louis, and by having someone mistake T for Eminem, a misunderstanding that leads to a short stint at Bellevue. These gimmicks do not redeem a deeply fractured narrative.
A novel still in search of itself.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-525-94933-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
Weirdly compelling and compellingly weird.
A story of taxidermy, political intrigue, and love between men from the author of The Convalescent (2009).
The story begins at the beginning—or close enough. It begins with the birth—or close enough—of our planet. Several eons pass over the next few pages until a Victorian naturalist traveling in Africa encounters his first aardvark. Then another story begins, and in this story, “you”—these sections are narrated in the second person—are an up-and-coming young Republican legislator with a Ronald Reagan fetish. These two stories become intertwined when an aardvark specimen Sir Richard Ostlet sent to his friend and lover Titus Downing, a taxidermist, is delivered to Alexander Paine Wilson’s D.C. town house. As both narratives unfold, it becomes clear that Wilson and Downing have a great deal in common. The taxidermist is compelled to be circumspect about his relationship with Ostlet because what they do together is an actual crime in 19th-century England. For Wilson, coming out is impossible not only because of his political party, but also because he doesn’t even define himself as gay. Yes, he has frequent and very enjoyable sexual encounters with a philanthropist named Greg Tampico, but they’re just two straight guys who happen to enjoy sex with other men. The aardvark serves as a sort of intermediary between these two men and their lovers. Resurrecting this strange beast allows Downing to stay connected with Ostlet even after Ostlet has abandoned him and married a woman. When a FedEx truck dumps this selfsame aardvark on Wilson’s doorstep, he sees it as a message from Greg—one that the congressman will spend most of the novel struggling to decipher. In addition to providing a lot of detail about the art of taxidermy, Anthony offers meditations on the interconnectedness of all things. There are also ghosts and Nazis, in case all that isn’t enough.
Weirdly compelling and compellingly weird.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53615-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sinuous, shape-shifting campus novel that promises more heft than it delivers.
Two crafty graduate students plot their revenge when a famous novelist abuses her power.
The collective voice that powers this novel belongs to the classmates of Hannah, a quiet but well-traveled writer with a keen editorial eye; Leslie, an outspoken erotica writer who keeps sex off the page in all her workshop submissions; and Jimmy, a brilliant but reserved poet suffering from depression. When Simone, Jimmy's workshop leader at the prestigious Fielding low-residency MFA program, tears Jimmy's submission apart in front of the entire class, the small community is shaken by her viciousness. Simone's criticism pushes an already fragile Jimmy over the edge, and Leslie and Hannah leap into action to prove Simone's not just a bad teacher, but an egomaniacal plagiarist. Zancan (Local Girls, 2015) writes in the third person plural as the Fielding graduates attempt to re-create what happened the year before they parted ways. "Maybe it was because Hannah, Leslie, and Jimmy's story was more interesting, always and finally, than the unfinished novels we kept in drawers after we graduated and the chap books we self-published, that it always drew us back in," the narrators write, considering their continued fascination with graduate school drama. In its best moments, the novel captures the quirky habits and strange personalities of those who are forced to love and practice their art in stolen moments, in two week intervals, during a low-residency MFA. But it also, at times, belabors what could be a powerful story about institutional power and the collective responsibility of storytelling in order to build suspense. "We wouldn't think anything of it until later, though," the narrators insist as they recount Hannah and Leslie's maneuverings. "At the time it was only happiness we felt." When Zancan at last gets down to the business of telling the story, she captures the fraught environment of almost-grown-ups on campus in sharp, unsparing detail and with lyrical momentum. While the clamorous chorus of her collective narrator occasionally elbows the thread of the plot out of the way, Zancan nevertheless asks intriguing questions about power, complicity, and the urge to tell someone else's story.
A sinuous, shape-shifting campus novel that promises more heft than it delivers.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53493-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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