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THE LAND OF STEADY HABITS

Name: THE LAND OF STEADY HABITS
Author: Ted Thompson
ISBN: 978-0-316-18656-8

by Ted Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2014

Thompson’s sharp-eyed debut is that kind of searing portrait of American wealth unraveling that is both dazzling and...

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That particularly American novel, examining the soul-crushing consequences of suburban prosperity, is modernized here as a successful financier looks around his life and sees a wasteland.

Southerner Anders Hill went to great lengths to avoid the upstanding conformity his father had planned for him, but at age 60, he’s not sure what difference it’s made. Sickened by the greed of Wall Street and his own personal culpability in all sorts of financial collateral damage, Anders embarks on a kind of slash-and-burn approach to his life: He opts for early retirement, asks his wife, Helene, for a divorce (kindly put on hold for a year while she recovers from a double mastectomy), stops paying the mortgage on their colonial and holes up in a condo he furnishes with Winslow Homer posters and decorative lobster traps. Anders’ existential crisis, simmering for 20 years, is a rejection of everything he’s built—the beautiful house in a tony Connecticut bedroom community (think Greenwich), two sons and a lovely wife—but now what? Meanwhile, thanks to Facebook, Helene has a boyfriend, Donny, who was Anders’ college roommate and Helene’s college boyfriend. An outcast among their friends, Anders has formed an unlikely friendship with Charlie, the rebellious teenage son of Mitchell and Sophie Ashby. After smoking PCP with Charlie at a holiday party (which sends Charlie to the hospital), Anders begins to fall apart in subtle but disturbing ways. Anders and Helene’s son Preston is an adult version of Charlie. After a wasted youth following Phish, dealing drugs, and beginning and quitting various programs and colleges, he finally has a college degree but not enough sense to use it. The three stages of the Connecticut man—Charlie, Preston and Anders—in this land of steady habits, have the instinct to rebel but lack the imagination to live happily.

Thompson’s sharp-eyed debut is that kind of searing portrait of American wealth unraveling that is both dazzling and immeasurably sad.

Pub Date: March 25, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-316-18656-8

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
Ted Thompson

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PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

A NOVEL

by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 13, 1970

None

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"If you can't deal with the morning, get out of the game." Maria Wyeth can't deal with the mornings or the long, disintegrating nights—she's been married to and divorced by Carter; she has a hopelessly damaged four-year-old and the insistent, regretful memory of an abortion; she's made a film or two; and she drifts from Hollywood to New York to Las Vegas and from bars to motels.In fact she's the kind of girl whom one of her looser contacts will call up and say "Did I catch you in the middle of an overdose" and this is the kind of scene which is "beaucoup fantastic." You may remember Run River (1963) which was about another scuffed spirit like Maria whose dissolution was as complete. But even though you have every reason to suspect that this is an ephemeral form of survival kitsch under its sophisticated maquillage, you won't be impervious.

None None

Pub Date: July 13, 1970

ISBN: 0374529949

Page Count: 244

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1970

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NOTES TO JOHN
by Joan Didion

- BOOK REVIEW
LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN
by Joan Didion

- BOOK REVIEW
SOUTH AND WEST
by Joan Didion

- PERSPECTIVES
Play It As It Lays: Adrift in Los Angeles

- IN THE NEWS
Joan Didion Has Died at 87

- PERSPECTIVES
How Kirkus Reviewed 5 Essential Joan Didion Books

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THE BOOK OF LONGINGS

by Sue Monk Kidd ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

A daring concept not so daringly developed.

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In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.

Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.

A daring concept not so daringly developed.