Enderby the Poet—corpulent, flatulent, malicious—arrived, full of bile and Joycean brio, in Enderby (1968). He took a look at New York circa 1973 in The Clockwork Testament (1975), promptly dying of a heart attack. And now, "to placate kind readers. . . who objected to my casually killing my hero," Enderby is resurrected circa 1976—in a brief, heavyhanded, disappointing episode. This time the prim poet is in Terrebasse, Indiana (that's the level of the wordplay here), hired to write the libretto for a musical about Will Shakespeare. His collaborators, of course, are a cartoonishly crude lot—they want show-biz, not Enderby's intricately rhymed Elizabethan-style verses. The show's backer is ostentatious local matron Mrs. Schoenbaum (more than a whiff of anti-Semitism here), whose favorite spiritualist claims to be in touch with Shakespeare's understandably riled-up ghost. But the co-star, in the Dark Lady role, is gorgeously black pop-diva April Elgar—and Enderby, smitten with lust, is soon tailoring the show to her non-Elizabethan talents. April, who switches back and forth between crude New Yorkese and a "slave whine" (both imperfectly rendered), is actually nice and educated; she invites Enderby to her Carolina home for Christmas (where he must pose as a clergyman, preaching an incoherent sermon to a Baptist congregation); she is not unresponsive to Enderby's infatuation. Still, Enderby—for "aesthetic" reasons—declines to convert his lust into reality, confining himself to masturbation. ("He had to cart the engorged shlong three times into the bathroom. . . .") And, in the ill-staged slapstick finale, the poet is forced to take over the role of Shakespeare on the opening night of the show. . . now titled Actor on His Ass. Burgess bulks out this thin novella with two labored Shakespeare fantasies—one at the beginning (WS drafts the 46th Psalm for the King James Bible), the other at the end (WS and time-travelers). He includes many examples of Enderby's hard-working libretto. But the central comic situation never comes to satiric life (mystery-writer Simon Brett would have gotten more laughs from it); the love-story manquÉ is limp; and the two strengths of the previous novels—the Enderby character, the rococo narration—only flair sporadically in this twiddling spin-off.
Pub Date: April 1, 1984
ISBN: 0070089760
Page Count: 160
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984
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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