This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.
An interpreter living in Brooklyn throws herself into the lives of acquaintances to avoid confronting her own life.
The unnamed narrator, a woman from Albania, is married to Billy, an American professor of film. Billy asks his wife to focus on translation work while taking a break from interpreting, as interpreting seems to interfere with her ability to remain present. But she takes a job serving as an interpreter for Alfred, another Albanian immigrant, first for a dental visit and then for therapy to confront his demons from the war in Kosovo. The therapist fires her after the first session, for both identifying too closely with the client and getting lost in her own thoughts. From there, the narrator acts impulsively without considering the repercussions. She tries to help a struggling Kurdish woman desperate to evade a stalker and a former client who needs a new immigration attorney. All the while, she’s prone to reveries and what appear to be dissociative episodes that leave Billy stupefied. When they reach an impasse, he accepts a six-month artist’s residency in Hungary. The night before he departs, his wife follows strangers to a party where she gets high on mushrooms and falls asleep. As a wife and a protagonist, she proves wonderfully and frustratingly off-kilter. Eventually she flees New York to visit family in Albania. The novel heats up in the second half, when she returns to Brooklyn, where some of the consequences of her previous heroics materialize to thrilling effect. These suspenseful moments punctuate otherwise meandering tangents. While intriguing at times, the narration relies heavily on rhetorical questions and digressions loosely tied to the story by way of the protagonist’s saying that so and so or such and such “come to mind.” Some of the associations are more interesting than others. The author is at her best when she reveals her thematic concerns and her characters’ interiority, through their idiosyncrasies, interactions with one another, choices, gestures, and dialogue.
This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781959030805
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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