Jacobson is often likened to Philip Roth, but there’s plenty of Isaac Bashevis Singer in his somewhat weary understanding of...
Another middle-age-angst–meets–sex-romp comedy from Jacobson (Man Booker Prize winner The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.), that great chronicler of modern rakery.
Originally published in Britain in 2002, before news of its author crossed the waters to these shores, Jacobson’s shaggy dog story is a little more descriptive and a little less conversational than his more recent work. Marvin Kreitman, South London’s luggage purveyor par excellence, is a picaresque lothario who just can’t help being who he is: He loves women unconditionally and unreasonably, so much so that besides the four women in his life—mother, wife (“When she wasn’t Oedipus she was Jocasta”), two daughters—he is desperately attempting to juggle relationships with five others. Added to this busy schedule, he keeps a standing lunch date each week with a school friend named Charlie who’s always been a bit of a schlimazel (“He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown onto the streets”), even though he has a stable, apparently happy marriage of long standing and enjoys some success as the author of children’s books. Yet Charlie, like Kreitman (Jacobson uses the first name for the former, the last name for the latter, as if to suggest the differences in emotional age and worldliness), is vaguely dissatisfied, and he proposes an arrangement that surprises even the ever-scheming Kreitman. Before things can go too far, fate intervenes in the form of a schlemiel (“Not merely Man with No Qualities but Man with No Prospects of Qualities”) who complicates things dangerously, revealing Kreitman’s fixations as being the silly but eminently harmful things that they are. Things cannot help but end—well, if not badly, then in a little more disarray than when the tale began.
Jacobson is often likened to Philip Roth, but there’s plenty of Isaac Bashevis Singer in his somewhat weary understanding of the human condition. Fans won’t be disappointed.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-686-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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