An intimate, loving portrait of a dreaded disease’s devastating effects.
Second-novelist Hays (In the Family Way, 1999, etc.) beautifully captures a husband’s grief as he watches his beloved wife slip into Alzheimer’s.
“My wife has gone,” ventures narrator Prate Marshbanks in the first sentence, and by this he means that Irene, his companion of 50 years, has begun to forget how to drive, cook, and take care of herself; sometimes she even forgets who her husband is. Prate is 75, a prickly, do-it-yourself house painter in Greenville, South Carolina, who adores his cultured wife, a former teacher, for having chosen him over more promising suitors. Although he initially resists the urgings of her doctor and of their only son, Newell, to put Irene in a nursing home, Prate finally recognizes that he can no longer give her the constant, watchful care she needs. Visiting her for hours daily at Rolling Hills, he learns in dismay that “the less you could take care of yourself, the less you were taken care of.” Newell, an overworked widower in North Carolina, needs to spend time at an artist colony in order to churn out paintings, so he leaves his reticent, bookish nine-year-old son, Jackson, in his father’s care for six weeks. The setup is complete when Billie, the lonely single gal next door, turns out to be an admirer of Newell’s work and insinuates herself into the household by helping to entertain Jackson. The plot is driven forward by Irene and Jackson’s beneficial impact on each other, and by the predictable progression of Billie and Newell’s romance. The crux of this affecting story, however, is the delineation of Prate’s love and sorrow as he helplessly witnesses the degeneration of his wife’s fine mind. When she fails to recognize their home, for example, he feels “like a plug had been pulled and our lifetime together was draining away.” Colloquial in tone, braced by its narrator’s stoic, plainspoken candor, Hays’s latest outing feels timely and true.
An intimate, loving portrait of a dreaded disease’s devastating effects.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33932-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
How do "impossible" couples evolve? In this most recent, luminous novel by Tyler, a "fairly chilly" man, muffled in loneliness, learns that a man and a woman can come together "for reasons the rest of the world would never guess." One can leave the principality of self to tour another's—to love "the surprise of her. . .the surprise of himself when he was with her." Macon Leary, married to Sarah, is an author of travel books for businessmen whose "concern was how to pretend they had never left home"—who want safe and comforting accommodations and food, who want to travel "without a jolt." Macon and Sarah, devastated by the senseless murder of their 12-year-old son in a fast-food shop holdup, are about to part. Sarah will leave this man that she claims remains "unchanged," who refuses to argue with the knowledge that the world is vile. Immobilized by a broken leg (was that accident an unconscious wish?), Macon will settle in with the family he started with—two brothers (one divorced) and sister Rose—in ultimate safety, where like plump, brooding fowl, the four deliberate in soothing converse, rearrange the straws of domesticity, Enter the "impossible" Muriel Pritchett, shrill as a macaw, single mother of a pale, wretched young boy, scrabbling for a living at various jobs, and existing messily on a cacophonous Baltimore street. Muriel has arrived at the Leary compound to whip into line Edward, Macon's pugnacious Welsh corgi who's fond of treeing bicyclists and family members. Muriel cows Edward while talking nonstop, and gradually Macon will find himself in "another country" of noise and color, where red slippers with feathers are necessary accessories to a woman in the morning. From a perspective where Macon feels he's a "vast distance from everyone who mattered" and a marriage where he and his wife seem to have "used each other up," Macon will find in foreignness his own "soft heart." Again in Tyler's tender, quiet prose, a delicate sounding of the odd and accidental incursions of the heart. Tone-perfect, and probably her best to date.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1985
ISBN: 0345452003
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
An intriguing but uneven debut.
A debut novelist explores the complexities of love and grief.
Maggie Krause is in bed with her girlfriend when she gets the call: Her mother has just died in a car accident. When she returns to her childhood home, she finds her younger brother angry and her father paralyzed by grief. The discovery of a cache of letters that her mother, Iris, wanted delivered to five different men gives Maggie something to do besides coping with her family’s loss or processing her own feelings: She decides that she will find the strangers to whom these letters are addressed. This road trip is a journey of discovery for Maggie. She learns that her parents’ seemingly idyllic union was not quite what she thought it was; the affairs to which the book’s title refers are extramarital. As she gets to know the men her mother loved, Maggie also gets to know her mother better. And, of course, she begins to better understand herself. This setup is interesting, but the storytelling veers from the slow and slightly superficial to the…kind of kitschy. A scene with an all-seeing psychic is particularly hard to take seriously, and the whole narrative hinges on a big reveal that feels melodramatic and a bit cheap. Masad has chosen to surprise readers instead of providing them with information they need to understand Iris even though there are chapters narrated from her perspective. Getting glimpses of her trysts feels more voyeuristic than revealing. And the one letter we get to read seems macabre and manipulative—gaslighting from beyond the grave. Where the book succeeds is in depicting queer characters as multifaceted human beings who are not defined solely by their sexuality or gender. Maggie’s relationship problems aren’t because she’s a lesbian; they’re because she’s afraid of commitment. And it’s not often that fiction writers—or anyone, for that matter—depict women of middle age and beyond as beings who desire and wish to be desired.
An intriguing but uneven debut.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4597-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
