A beautifully written experimental novel that lacks narrative momentum.
A young woman lays bare her memories in a fragmented debut.
“It begins with our bodies. Skin on Skin. My body burst from yours. Safe together in the violent dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us,” begins Andrews’ debut novel: a meditation on mother-daughter relationships and finding a place to call home. The coming-of-age story is told from the perspective of Lucy, a millennial trying to navigate her present while examining her past. Present-day Lucy lives in her late grandfather’s cottage in Ireland, where she recounts her memories of childhood in northern England. In short vignettes, she remembers the absence of her alcoholic father, the experience of learning to communicate with her deaf brother, and the way her beautiful mother struggled to keep everyone (including herself) together. She also recounts her wild youth, her university experience in London, and the litany of unnamed men who circle her. Lucy’s thoughts constantly return to her mother—the first and great love of her life—and their relationship, which has become strained over the years. As a child, she thought: “I would forever be in her orbit, moving towards her and pulling away while she quietly controlled the tides, anchoring me to something.” The natural untethering that happens between mothers and daughters is remarkably rendered—the heartsickness given gravitas equal to romantic relationships. Andrews is undoubtedly a talented writer, but this book seems more concerned with sentence-level beauty than narrative. The lovely minutiae of the vignettes sometimes overshadow or crowd out the book’s larger themes. Despite this, Andrews’ writing explores themes like memory, home, womanhood, and mother-daughter relationships with shattering clarity: “Girls with orange cheeks in push-up bras brushed past us, smelling of the future” and “that safe, yellow space of bedtimes and steamy kitchens.”
A beautifully written experimental novel that lacks narrative momentum.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-25380-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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