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ANIMAL SPIRIT

Emotionally charged issues of commitment, loyalty, and trust explored with dry yet oddly comforting European wit.

Marciano's latest is made up of six longish stories set mostly in a vibrantly described Rome, often involving animals as pets or predators.

“Terrible Things Could Happen To Us,” about the ripple effect of an unexpected death, sucks the reader in immediately. Told from the multiple viewpoints of the dead man’s wife, her married lover, the lover’s wife, and both couples’ children, who are unhappily aware of their parents’ secrets, the story has a layered structure that gives it the rich, leisurely feel of a Fellini film. Though narrowly focused on two characters, “The Girl” also feels larger than its form. A young woman recently out of rehab apprentices with a circus snake charmer who hopes to charm her into loving him. He fails but years later rediscovers her in a satisfyingly bittersweet conclusion. The title story that follows is actually the book’s weakest. It cleverly contrasts the tensions between two couples—one newly minted, the other long-standing—who share a vacation cottage. But a lost puppy becomes the too-obvious metaphor for domestic bliss, and the resolution feels pat. In “Indian Land,” “the fragility of nature” more successfully reflects human fragility as a happily married woman leaves her husband in Rome to aid an ex-lover having a nervous breakdown in New Mexico (described with gorgeous affection). In “There Might Be Blood,” a New Yorker takes a two-month break from her troubled marriage to live in Rome. When hostile sea gulls beset her terrace, she hires a sea gull remover and finds herself obsessed, “like being in love,” with his hawk. Avian aggression exposes marital truths the woman has been avoiding. In the final story, “The Call Back,” an American film director in Rome meets the woman who inadvertently caused his older sister’s death 25 years earlier. Death’s lasting power echoes back through the stories, but Marciano’s closing lines offer hard-won hope.

Emotionally charged issues of commitment, loyalty, and trust explored with dry yet oddly comforting European wit.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4815-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

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THE WEDDING PEOPLE

Uneven but fitfully amusing.

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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

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

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