This novel doesn’t lack ambition, but that both helps and hinders it.
Taylor’s sprawling novel explores the heyday of a rock star—and his life in obscurity decades later.
Writing fictional musicians is a task that can easily go wrong: Create a figure who seems unbelievable in a certain place or time, and you risk the entire narrative falling apart. Taylor is himself a musician—as well as a writer and curator—and he makes this novel’s title character feel both singular and like someone who could have become prominent in the 1960s and '70s. John Nightly’s biography has traces of Syd Barrett, John Cale, and Lou Reed—his magnum opus recalls Reed’s Metal Machine Music—but his aptitude for both folk-influenced rock and avant-garde composition takes him to a few unexpected places. The novel follows Nightly in three distinct periods: his ascent to stardom, his bottoming out in the 1970s, and his life decades later, when he’s become fixated on botany. Of these, the scenes of Nightly near the end of his life are the most affecting, especially those that focus on his bond with nurse John RCN. Unfortunately, the novel has a tendency to sprawl in ways that feel ungainly. Nearly all the male characters who appear early in the book are named John, and certain parts—especially Nightly’s conversation with a Japanese journalist whose questions are rendered in phonetic English—feel excessive. There are some genuinely moving scenes to be found here, especially near the end, but at times it reads like a chamber piece that’s been expanded to an epic scale without quite clicking.
This novel doesn’t lack ambition, but that both helps and hinders it.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78352-851-6
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Unbound
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.
An undergraduate at Brown University unearths the buried history of a Latine artist.
As in her bestselling debut, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022), Gonzalez shrewdly anatomizes racial and class hierarchies. Her bifurcated novel begins at a posh art-world party in 1985 as the title character, a Cuban American land and body artist, garners recognition that threatens the ego of her older, more famous husband, white minimalist sculptor Jack Martin. The story then shifts to Raquel Toro, whose working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place among the “Art History Girls” who easily chat with professors and vacation in Europe. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1998, Raquel wins a prestigious summer fellowship at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her faculty adviser is enthusiastic about her thesis on Jack Martin, even if she’s not. Soon she’s enjoying the attentions of Nick Fitzsimmons, a well-connected, upper-crust senior. As Raquel’s story progresses, Anita’s first-person narrative acquires a supernatural twist following the night she falls from the window of their apartment —“jumped? or, could it be, pushed?”—but it’s grimly realistic in its exploration of her toxic relationship with Jack. (A dedication, “In memory of Ana,” flags the notorious case of sculptor Carl Andre, tried and acquitted for the murder of his wife, artist Ana Mendieta.) Raquel’s affair with Nick mirrors that unequal dynamic when she adapts her schedule and appearance to his whims, neglecting her friends and her family in Brooklyn. Gonzalez, herself a Brown graduate, brilliantly captures the daily slights endured by someone perceived as Other, from microaggressions (Raquel’s adviser refers to her as “Mexican”) to brutally racist behavior by the Art History Girls. While a vividly rendered supporting cast urges Raquel to be true to herself and her roots, her research on Martin leads to Anita’s art and the realization that she belongs to a tradition that’s been erased from mainstream art history.
An uncompromising message, delivered via a gripping story with two engaging heroines.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250786210
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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