Give the author his own ill-fated summation: “It’s a cruel cliché: the last thing you lose is hope.”
An elderly painter with roots in South America reflects on his life since he immigrated to New York City.
It’s hard to say what was on González’s mind as he wrote this novel, nearly 40 years after his debut, In the Beginning Was the Sea (1983), but it’s a very poetic reverie. Our narrator is an aged painter with origins in Bogotá, Colombia—called “Don David” by his housekeeper, Ángela—but in the current timeline, he’s relatively settled in New York. The most important people in his life have been his wife, Sara, whom he married at 26 and was married to for some five decades until she passed away, and his sons, Pablo and Jacobo, each of whom had their own burdens to carry. This is in some ways a reflection on aging, as the painter has macular degeneration and a variety of other maladies, and in others simply a picturesque and vivid remembrance of the moments that mattered in one person's life. At the bottom of it all is the narrator's unending grief over his son, Jacobo, paralyzed when a junkie driving a pickup truck struck the taxi he was riding in at the time. To his credit, González could have written a portrait of triumph over adversity, but life just doesn’t work that way sometimes, and the painter is forced to see his son suffer and finally die. The book’s narrative style is both modest and subdued, no doubt aided by Rosenberg, who previously translated the author’s last work, The Storm (2018). For better or worse, mostly it’s sad, neither a celebration of the narrator’s long life nor an embittered prosecution of the terrible pitfalls that befell him and his. It’s just a life, after all.
Give the author his own ill-fated summation: “It’s a cruel cliché: the last thing you lose is hope.”Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-939810-60-1
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry.
Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and may be approaching dementia.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along.
A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780374618599
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.
Two sisters sail around the world.
It’s 1911, and after her much older half sister marries a ship’s captain, teenage Kay joins them onboard the Morning Light for a trip around the world. Their strict father has recently died, and as they travel, the sisters find themselves still haunted by his legacy: He’d run a school for Native American children in remote Canada, where scores of students apparently died from tuberculosis. Now Kay suffers from nightmares so severe she wakes up screaming. But as the trip continues, both Kay and her sister, Thea, begin to have a look around them. Kay begins studying ancient Greek with a goofy English pastor who’s joined them. Things change when Thea, who longs for a child, adopts a young boy from a poor Micronesian island. Kay is troubled by the adoption, though she can’t immediately articulate why. Endicott depicts her characters with great delicacy and sympathy. Kay, especially, is a wonder to behold: She’s barely a teenager when the novel begins, and to witness her first encounters with the world, as she quietly unravels her own feelings and beliefs about what she sees, is simply marvelous. The novel’s second half shifts in time and mood in a way that feels both surprising and exactly right. There is so much in this book to linger over, from Kay and Thea’s relationship with each other to the strength and autonomy of Kay’s mind to Endicott’s lyrical descriptions of the sea and the ship. It’s a novel to return to again and again.
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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