Wild, weird, and wonderful. Harington should send a copy to Al Gore—then disconnect his phone.
If Robert Penn Warren had ever been turned on to hallucinogens, he might have produced something like this fantasy of a mad southern autodidact who runs for governor of Arkansas and finds just enough lunatics to bring him to the threshold of victory.
Real-life characters (the author among them) are mixed into this stew of fiction and fact, which simmers at a nice slow pace in Harington’s roundabout narration. We start from the little Ozark hamlet of Stay More (When Angels Rest, 1998, etc.), home to the polymath pig-farmer Vernon Inglenook. Made rich at an early age by the razorback hogs his family for generations has turned into the succulent Inglenook Hams, Vernon has been able to devote the better part of his life (i.e., the afternoon and evening parts, once the hogs had been slopped) to a systematic program of self-education. Moving from A to Z, he had already mastered art, chess, finance, medicine, and oceanography by the time he reached politics. Not content with skimming Locke and Hobbes, he decided to test their theories by running for governor against the odious incumbent, Shoat Bradfield. Although he has no political experience and quite a few political liabilities (not the least being a common-law marriage to his first cousin Jelena Inglenook), Vernon puts together a first-rate campaign team (known to the press corps as “The Seven Samurai”) that manages by hook and crook to bulldoze him through the primaries and to the Democratic nomination. Vowing to “extirpate” handguns, tobacco, prisons, schools, and hospitals from the state if elected, Vernon presents one of the strangest campaign platforms ever seen. Are there enough madmen—even in Arkansas—to get him into office? Let’s just say that it all comes down to absentee ballots in the end.
Wild, weird, and wonderful. Harington should send a copy to Al Gore—then disconnect his phone.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6855-4
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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