A valiant effort, but Schwartz doesn’t quite pull it off.
Schwartz’s tenth (after Referred Pain, 2004, etc.) may be her riskiest, as it intertwines her familiar fictional territory with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
Things start on a bright September morning when Renata, a linguist, wakes up in bed with her lover, Jack, a recently divorced social worker. After Jack leaves, Renata decides to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to work, but, partway across, she hears screaming and looks across the river to see “a huge marigold bursting open in the sky.” With this opening, Schwartz focuses on how the attack evokes past traumas, leaving Renata unmoored and jeopardizing her relationship with Jack. We learn that Renata and her twin sister, Claudia, were close until age 16, when Claudia had a daughter (fathered, it turns out, by their uncle), gave the baby up for adoption, then drowned in a nearby river days later. Renata’s father died in a car wreck within the year, and her mother was institutionalized. When Claudia’s daughter, Gianna, was three, the adoptive parents dumped her on Renata, then 19. At seven, Gianna was snatched from a park merry-go-round, leaving Renata bereft and guilty. Now 34, Renata has trouble trusting Jack, or anyone, to stay in her life. Schwartz describes the emotional flavor of the days after 9/11 with great clarity, using quotes from speeches by the president, the makeshift signs put up by those in search of the missing, the memorials, the connections neighbors made in the midst of tragedy and the exhaustion of those who, like Jack, went to the scene to help. But it all bogs down in backstory, and Renata’s irrational conviction that a mute teenager she finds wandering the streets is her niece isn’t believable. Plus, Schwartz undercuts the emotion in scenes between Renata and Jack with detail about Renata’s linguistic interest in a culture that has many terms for loss.
A valiant effort, but Schwartz doesn’t quite pull it off.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-299-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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