Fictional take #2 for Shapiro, author of the roundly esteemed debut novel Playing with Fire (1990), points out what the artsy members of Yale's class of about 1980 did after graduation, while their squarer fellows were trading bonds on Wall Street. Of course, Shapiro's principal players, Josie Hirsch and Billy Overmeyer, aren't your average college kids. They grew up together in a New Jersy suburb, where Josie (the narrator) had a knack for being where she wasn't supposed to be—cutting classes to spend the day in New York City, cuddling with Billy in the woods, or secretly watching her divorced dad make love to a neighbor, plump and lovely Mrs. Overmeyer. Here, Josie's past is interspersed with the present, as she acts in an Off-Off Broadway hit and laments the desertion of her live-in beau. But Josie's real problems are twofold: Her mother, an internationally acclaimed artist named Georgia, treats Josie like a daughter only on rare occasions, and, to make matters worse, Josie and Billy love each another (and always have), though they can't come out of the closet with it because Billy became her stepbrother when Mr. Hirsch married Mrs. Overmeyer. Then one night near Central Park, while Georgia and Josie helplessly look on, Billy gets beat up by a mugger, leaving him a vegetable. To vanquish the ghosts that haunt her, Josie will have to make a rapprochement with her self-centered mother, kick a drinking habit, and reveal her own ``private Holocaust''—her hopeless love for Billy. Shapiro is reaching for Euripides here—if in her own hip, downtownish way—and, despite certain overobvious plot manipulations, does manage to grasp onto the tragedian's sleeve. She also digs into some good and gritty mother-daughter dirt. So for seekers after darkness, why not?
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42107-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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