A muted and melancholy domestic tale.
A playwright and his art historian daughter take divergent paths studying class and creativity.
Giardina’s sixth novel, following Norumbega Park (2012), opens in 2012 as Henry Rando is riding high on the success of a book about nearing 70, How To Be This Age. But a bestseller isn’t assuaging his flickering career in the theater or a sense that he needs to do more with his life. So, he joins a Catholic humanitarian aid group to Haiti, where he gathers play material and stirs up a well-cloaked homosexuality. Meanwhile, his daughter, Miranda, has quit her job at an auction house to write a biography of Anna Soloff, whose stark portraits in the vein of Alice Neel and Lucian Freud had her toiling in obscurity until becoming a high-dollar artist late in life. Through both characters, Giardina explores noblesse oblige, suppressed emotions, and the ways that money tends to muck with true art. (It mucks with Manhattan too: “The neighborhood had become the province of Art,” he writes of Chelsea. “And money, don’t forget money.”) For Henry, the fate of his inevitably mediocre Haiti-inspired play prompts him to do more than be a bystander; for Miranda, success means doing right by Soloff’s story while fending off the sense that the biography will do little more than up the artist’s market value. Fitting for a story rooted in upscale New York City with an eye on the past, Giardina writes with a genteel, Cheever-esque grace and charm. The style can be distancing, though, and the story lacks a certain body heat; there’s not a strong sense that, for these well-off characters, a lot is at stake, even when both of them hit a crisis point. Even at a low boil, though, the novel is a cleareyed study of how a scruffier Manhattan and clearer ethics gave way to a more compromised and machined world.
A muted and melancholy domestic tale.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780374611347
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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