Intelligent and tough-minded, as Smiley’s work always is, but capped by an oddly disjunctive finale.
A stroll through recent American history with a modestly successful singer-songwriter.
More than three-quarters of Jodie Rattler’s account of her life is a straightforward realistic text, spiked with dry Midwestern humor, about growing up in St. Louis with a single mother supported by a close-knit extended family. Jodie has been lucky, she tells us, since age 6, when her uncle took her to the racetrack and gave her a share of his winnings. That $86 roll stays with her through a musical career that she never has to work at very hard, thanks to a novelty Christmas hit she wrote while still in college in 1969. The royalties bankroll her through the next half-century, including a long trip with a serious love affair in England and a bohemian residency in New York enlivened by 23 lovers (she kept a list). Jodie’s down-to-earth descriptions of writing songs, cutting a few albums, and singing with various bands is reminiscent of Smiley’s nuts-and-bolts dissection of fiction writing in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), as is her blunt narrative voice. Her creator riffs on this similarity with running appearances by “the gawky girl” Jodie knew slightly in high school, unmistakably Smiley, though her name is never mentioned. St. Louis (Smiley’s real-life hometown) is the lovingly rendered setting for the most moving scenes after Jodie moves back to care for her aging grandparents and alcoholic mother. The rest of the locales are more generic, as are the current events dropped in to situate Jodie’s experiences chronologically. At its close, the novel takes an apocalyptic leap into the near future that matches Smiley’s darkest pages in A Thousand Acres (1991) and The Greenlanders (1988). This abrupt change of tone is presumably intended to spotlight the way extremes of every variety from climactic to political have become the norm, but it makes for a jarring conclusion to an otherwise low-key novel.
Intelligent and tough-minded, as Smiley’s work always is, but capped by an oddly disjunctive finale.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593535011
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
