Fine, uncompromising work likely to prompt admiration more than wholehearted appreciation.
The final manuscript by an elderly novelist whose memory is failing is the springboard for a meditation on the creative process and the loneliness of the writer’s life.
Dora Frenhofer was never a bestselling author, and over the years her “succession of small novels about small men in small crises” have sold fewer and fewer copies for smaller and smaller publishers. Now, 73 years old and isolated in her London home by the pandemic lockdown, she works desultorily on a new novel written in her own voice (“not pretending to be anyone else for a change”), with each chapter centered on a different character. These chapters alternate with diary entries that describe Dora’s experiences during the lockdown and end with various crossed-out sentences that eventually lead to the opening of the next chapter. Each chapter’s protagonist is someone connected to Dora: her estranged daughter, her brother, an immigrant hired to clear out her house, a fellow participant in a literary festival, a bicycle deliveryman, a former lover, and a longtime friend. She invents stories for them—an unrequited love, imprisonment and torture, the murders of two children—that are slowly revealed to be Dora’s embroidery of events from her own history. Or are they? Nothing is for certain in an intricately braided narrative that constantly suggests new possibilities about the factual underpinnings of fiction. The characters are viewed through Dora’s uncharitable eyes; the compassion for damaged souls that suffused such earlier Rachman novels as The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers and The Italian Teacher is still in evidence here, but it’s muffled by Dora’s brutally blunt judgments of their personal failings and professional failures—and her own. The interplay among various versions of the characters’ links to Dora is fascinating, and Rachman’s prose is lucid and elegant, as always. But the bleak tone throughout, culminating in an appropriately grim conclusion, makes this austere novel difficult to engage with emotionally.
Fine, uncompromising work likely to prompt admiration more than wholehearted appreciation.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780316552851
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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