Enjoyably dozy and slight, like a long afternoon in the south Florida sun.
Undercover goings-on at an exclusive Florida gated community.
One would imagine there’d be pretty much nothing happening on the happy little fictional isle of Eden, a haven just off the Florida coast for richer-than-Croesus types who want to live in a place that’s “like a Caribbean resort only without the poverty, dodgy politics and truculent natives”—and one would pretty much be right. But that doesn’t stop Mewshaw (Shelter From the Storm; Do I Owe You Something?: A Memoir of the Literary Life, both 2002) from trying to rustle something up. At the eye of the yuppified storm is Frank Pritchard, a retired CEO forced out of his company by some less-than-ethical types, whose loving wife died not so long ago. He spends his days talking with his friend, the Black Widow–like Randi Dickson, hanging out with his dead wife’s therapist (whom he likely has feelings for), and thinking about killing himself. His neighbor is Cal Barlow, a wheelchair-bound loner who plays around with his pistol when he thinks nobody is watching. Frank and Cal strike up a friendship, the two becoming interested romantically in Randi at about the same time, and, all the while, Cal’s secret identity, that of a drug dealer in the Witness Protection Program, is about to blow up in his face. The story noodles along at first, content with the easygoing rhythms of Cal and Frank’s friendship, the sunny idleness of Eden’s vacuous luxury, and its residents’ ill-hidden fear of the outside world and, indeed, reality. But when Frank decides to stir things up a bit by going on an ill-advised graffiti campaign around the island, unwanted attention is the result—and things decline from there. Mewshaw has an easier way with his story this time, his tenth outing, than in his last: little here feels forced, and the context is so powerfully evoked it overwhelms what little plot there is.
Enjoyably dozy and slight, like a long afternoon in the south Florida sun.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15221-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
