Intelligent and chilling.
This novel lays bare the mind of a sociopath whose accomplishments, normal life, and respected position disguise his true nature.
At 34, cardiologist Jeremy Balint is the youngest head of any medical division at his hospital. Married and the father of two daughters, his princesses, whose welfare he values above all else, Balint is stunned to find evidence of his wife Amanda’s infidelity with Warren Sugarman, a hospital colleague. Amanda handles every practical detail of household management on top of her nearly full-time job, and Balint doesn’t know how to manage life without her. As an adult, he’s always done right. Now, he realizes, “playing by the rules was for losers.” If he could murder Sugarman without getting caught, he would—and why should an intelligent man like him get caught? Balint develops a careful plan, designed to ensure getting away with murder, that will entail multiple victims. To further settle the score, he pursues an affair with a beautiful nursing student. Over months, Balint makes his preparations, murders victims, and enjoys his affair. Meanwhile, his career—and his reputation as an ethical man—grows. He feels no guilt; after all, he’s safeguarding his daughters’ futures. But Balint’s actions affect his marriage in a way he doesn’t expect, and the novel ends with a hint that his mask has slipped. Appel (The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street, 2016, etc.), a physician, attorney, and bioethicist, avoids glamorizing his sociopath or wallowing in blood-bath crimes. Instead, this is a thoughtful, subtle dissection of how a certain kind of sociopath, found “in the highest echelons of power,” operates. Perhaps what Appel does most interestingly is to show how Balint fails to understand himself or how others see him. He’s astonished to learn that everyone at the hospital knows of his affair; he believes he loves his daughters, but it’s clear they’re only narcissistic extensions, “the guardians of his image after his death. Balint had “lived his entire adult life as an upstanding citizen”— but a horrifying event from his childhood reveals this line to be self-justifying spin.
Intelligent and chilling.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-57962-495-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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