Strong, grim, haunting portrait of a man inescapably marked by an act of violence, in a first novel by the author of the memoir The Same River Twice (1993). Virgil, a bright, restless, laconic young man, finds himself doubly burdened when his wild older brother Boyd is murdered. The hell-raising Boyd has been an essential part of Virgil's life, and Virgil's grief is pressing and deep. And, because life in his isolated corner of Kentucky has not been much altered by modern times, his family, his friends, and even the local sheriff expect Virgil to avenge Boyd's death by killing the local rough suspected of the deed. Reluctantly, and with growing despair, Virgil plots to do so. Afterward, he flees west, and the bulk of the novel is taken up with his life in the backwoods of Montana. The skills evident in Offutt's earlier writing, including his pitch-perfect rendition of the vivid, terse, often droll character of the spoken word, and his talent for vigorously, precisely describing rural blue-collar culture, its trailer courts and bars, struggling factories and backroad settlements, are once again on display. Virgil expects that Montana will offer him a chance to hide until he can puzzle out what to do. But the relatives of the man he murdered come searching for him, and, through yet another act of violence, he inadvertently falls in with modern militiamen who've declared war on the US government. Virgil, drawn to the strong, independent sister of one of the group's members, finds that, no matter how he tries, violence has become an inescapable part of his life. The apocalyptic ending is bloody, sad, and convincing. As a portrait of a good man's life shattered by violence, and as a meditation on the persistent attraction of violence in American society, Offutt's first fiction is persuasive, original, and disturbing. The work of a sizable talent. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80983-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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