In this tragicomic novel, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.
Lethem’s 10th novel is a romp in which history, both personal and collective, can't help but assert itself.
Lethem's new novel tells the story of a backgammon hustler named Alexander Bruno who suffers from a pair of physical (or metaphysical) disorders: first, telepathy, or second sight, and then a membranous tumor beneath the surface of his face that does have the happy side effect of keeping his psychic abilities at bay. But when the tumor needs to be removed, Bruno encounters the key conundrum of this free-wheeling novel: that sometimes survival requires more than a bit of despair. Bruno discovers this when he returns to Berkeley, where he was raised, to confront the ghosts of his history, embodied in the figure of Keith Stolarsky, a childhood friend who, for his own reasons, decides to bankroll Bruno’s surgery and recovery. “Why had Stolarsky wanted to save Bruno?” Lethem asks. “What was his life for?” The question cuts two ways. For Bruno, the issue is life or death but also more than that, because the life he has built—traveling alone and playing backgammon as a way of walling off not just his gift (such as it is), but indeed his very heritage—must be altered, drastically. “You asked me to save you,” his surgeon reflects, “but to save you I had to destroy you. That is what I do.” Stolarsky’s motives are more elusive; a reclusive entrepreneur and hippie capitalist, he is, at heart, about control. As such, the novel turns, as it must, conspiratorial, although, as in most conspiracies, it is not always clear who is manipulating whom. Think Thomas Pynchon (whose books this one superficially resembles), especially in the scenes set in Berkeley, a landscape of hipster burger shops and lost souls still longing for a revolution that washed out in an undertow of drugs and dissolution decades before. That makes the novel a fitting follow-up to Dissident Gardens (2013), which traced a different (and not unrelated) set of radical breakdowns, those of New York in the 1950s and the communist left. Lest this sound weighty, it’s not, so much: Lethem takes real pleasure in the language and writes with a sense of the absurd that illuminates his situations and his characters. “Telegraph Avenue,” he writes, describing Berkeley’s famous open-air market of countercultural chaos, “the island of lost toys.” It’s a vivid metaphor.
In this tragicomic novel, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53990-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
PROFILES
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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