A novella enlarged beyond its natural length, but still vintage Just.
The wife of an American expatriate is killed under mysterious circumstances. Is revenge in order? That’s the question posed by Just (An Unfinished Season, 2005, etc.) in his thought-provoking novel.
An injured Frenchwoman is being carried down the Pyrenees by four stretcher-bearers. Florette has spent all her 54 years in the village below, but the men are not locals. Smugglers? Refugees? They’re on a mission and Florette, met by chance, is a distraction. They cut her throat and abandon her. She will be found by her husband, Thomas Railles, an older American, a portrait painter, and his lifelong friends Bernhard and Russ, CIA field operatives who have used Thomas to do small jobs, nothing violent. Good detective work and Franco-American cooperation lead to the arrest of the four in Le Havre. They are Islamists and mercenaries. Thomas reluctantly watches their interrogation through a two-way mirror. Their leader, Yussef, is Moroccan. A younger guy (his son?) is beaten bloody with bastinados. Thomas spends time alone with Yussef and is tempted, momentarily, to use the bastinado himself. These 40 pages are the heart of the novel, and they’re superb—as suspense, as theater, as psychological warfare. Thomas concludes that seeing his wife’s killers has not helped him. The story winds down with Thomas living alone in Maine. The author is as seductive a raconteur as ever: companionable and worldly in an unaffected way. Many elements are familiar from his past work: the American painter living in France (Ambition and Love, 1994), the spies and secrets (take your pick). The big secrets here involve Thomas’s neighbor, an ancient Englishman who was a WWI deserter, and a Spanish communist probably killed on Bernhard’s orders (Thomas feels complicit). What’s new is a sharper tone regarding the US, which Bernhard sees as “spoiled, peevish.” A blind 9/11 casualty is also a loudmouth and bully, starting a fight in the village café; the Englishman’s great-niece is a hard, flag-waving American matron.
A novella enlarged beyond its natural length, but still vintage Just.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-63463-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult...
A Boston-area waitress manages debt, grief, medical troubles, and romantic complications as she finishes her novel.
“There are so many things I can’t think about in order to write in the morning,” Casey explains at the opening of King’s (Euphoria, 2014, etc.) latest. The top three are her mother’s recent death, her crushing student loans, and the married poet she recently had a steaming-hot affair with at a writer’s colony. But having seen all but one of her writer friends give up on the dream, 31-year-old Casey is determined to stick it out. After those morning hours at her desk in her teensy garage apartment, she rides her banana bike to work at a restaurant in Harvard Square—a setting the author evokes in delicious detail, recalling Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, though with a lighter touch. Casey has no sooner resolved to forget the infidel poet than a few more writers show up on her romantic radar. She rejects a guy at a party who reveals he’s only written 11 1/2 pages in three years—“That kind of thing is contagious”—to find herself torn between a widowed novelist with two young sons and a guy with an irresistible broken tooth from the novelist's workshop. Casey was one of the top two golfers in the country when she was 14, and the mystery of why she gave up the sport altogether is entangled with the mystery of her estrangement from her father, the latter theme familiar from King’s earlier work. In fact, with its young protagonist, its love triangle, and its focus on literary ambition, this charmingly written coming-of-age story would be an impressive debut novel. But after the originality and impact of Euphoria, it might feel a bit slight.
Read this for insights about writing, about losing one’s mother, about dealing with a cranky sous-chef and a difficult four-top.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4853-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
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