A sweet, occasionally thrilling story of an elderly man trying to make sense of his past and a young man trying to make...
In Bachner’s debut novel, a retired English teacher’s lifelong regrets spill over into the present.
In 1994, a retired schoolteacher and minor academic named Paul Cormier is dying in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He’s fearful of spending the end of his life “alone in my sunny apartment with only fear, regret, and guilt for company.” The calm of his hermitic last months is disrupted by Alan Ricks, a senior at the Roosevelt School—Cormier’s place of employment for some four decades—who has been sent to interview him for an oral history project. Ricks’ questions draw out the dying man’s memories; Cormier goes beyond institutional history, exploring every facet of his own life. He recounts his lonely childhood in a small Maine town as the overweight son of a French-Canadian heiress and an absentee socialist father, his double life as a closeted gay private school teacher in the 1940s and ’50s, and his life’s greatest regret regarding the fate of a boy named Nate, whom he knew in his early years of teaching. In the present, Cormier and his interviewer eventually form an intergenerational friendship, with each person filling a void left by a tragedy in the other’s past. The relationship is complicated as Ricks’ life careens off the expected private school track. The narrative moves slowly, and it takes a while for the temporally disparate strands to come together. On the occasion of Nate’s bar mitzvah, his uncle advises him, “If you're going to be a writer, you have to put it all down, even things that seem pointless.” At times, readers may wish that Bachner hadn’t taken this advice himself. At other times, however—such as the moving sections about Cormier’s tumultuous affair with a married writer or about Ricks’ fast-paced adventures in the ’90s downtown club scene—readers will appreciate every word.
A sweet, occasionally thrilling story of an elderly man trying to make sense of his past and a young man trying to make sense of his own future.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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