A young fabulist's highly touted first novel (``already sold in seven countries'') combines the techniques of Thomas McGuane with bits of Lolita and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lonely, nondescript Jeremy is a fact-checker for Screen magazine when, during lunch hour one day, a lovely young woman who calls herself Lady Henrietta (after Wilde's Lord Henry) asks whether he'll come to her apartment to pose nude for a painting. (She ordinarily paints beautiful male nudes by commission from Playgirl.) Jeremy poses twice, and only then learns from Lady Henrietta's voluptuous, mischievous, lively, and precocious 11- year-old daughter Sara what his virtue as a model is: Henrietta considers him an extreme example of an Optical Illusion—meaning ``almost but not quite something.'' In Jeremy's case, he's ``almost ugly, but not quite, almost good-looking, but not quite. You almost look like you might commit suicide at any second, but not quite.'' Nonetheless, oddly nubile Sara falls in love with him, and having enlisted her mother's help seduces him (in some detail) on a rip- roaring trip to Disneyland. For the first time in his life Jeremy develops a passion—for preadolescent Sara; but Sara has developed a deadly brain tumor. Before it can kill her, however, she's run over by a car driven by a woman who's swerved at the sight of a nude man—Jeremy's only friend Tommy, as it turns out—standing in a window above the street, staring at a bird. With Sara dead, Henrietta, grieving, insists on painting another portrait of Jeremy—except that in this one he looks just like Sara. And, indeed, he has come to resemble Sara—to be mischievous, lively, and much more voluptuous than he was at the beginning of the novel. The ending is ambiguous: as in Wilde's novel, ``there was hope.'' Sara and Jeremy's mother are splendid, but the book's surreal elements are only intermittently successful and its shape and theme are wobbly. Still, an interesting debut.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-84785-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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