An inventive meditation on grief and art.
A widowed professor struggles with writing, coffee, antisemitism, and dance music.
The narrator of Haber’s elliptical, mordantly funny third novel can’t get his mind in order. Now that he’s left his job teaching humanities and philosophy at a community college—he won’t say if he quit or was fired—he’s determined to finish his long-gestating book-length essay on Montaigne. But interruptions abound. He’s still mourning the recent death of his wife from dementia, his DJ son keeps calling to natter on about trends in electronic dance music, and he can’t stop obsessing over his former employer’s disciplinary hearings or the artists’ retreat where he befriended a brilliant but troubled sculptor. The novel’s orthographic structure underscores the narrator’s near-derangement: The book is effectively three long paragraphs, rife with lengthy sentences that often end in very different places from when they began. So it’s not hard to see why the narrator’s book project has failed to come together, and his complaint that “the modern world has destroyed the ability to have a single unfettered thought” seems a scapegoating of his emotional disarray. As he shares more about his life, comic incidents rise to the surface, like his ill-fated effort to maintain an espresso machine under his classroom desk. But darker details emerge as well, about his wife’s rapid decline and the antisemitism the sculptor and her family experienced. Soon, the narrator’s obsession with finding space to think—a “mental Sahara,” as he puts it—begins to feel more like a dereliction of moral duty to his family and students. Though Haber tells this story in long sentences, the language never becomes ungainly or abstractly Gertrude Stein–like. And as the narrator cycles between joy, regret, and frustration, the language echoes his struggle. (“Was my life merely procrastination and delay, a false endeavor never to bear fruit?”) But while the narrator’s mind is chaotic, Haber’s command is steady.
An inventive meditation on grief and art.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781566897198
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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