Beautifully constructed; a devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.
A young woman navigates uneasy relationships with herself, her weight, and the world in Awad’s painfully raw—and bitingly funny—debut.
When we meet Lizzie March, she’s in high school, fighting the profound boredom of suburbia and adolescence with her best friend, Mel. “The universe is against us, which makes sense,” she observes. “So we get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while.” Later—the novel is told in a series of self-contained vignettes, snapshots of Lizzie from fat adolescence into thin adulthood—we watch Lizzie spend a tortured afternoon trying to take an acceptable full-body shot to send to her online boyfriend; we watch her date, or sort of date, a sleazy jazz harmonica player (“Archibald doesn’t take me to dinner, but I can be naked in front of him”). Lizzie becomes Beth, graduates from college, eats tiny salads; loses some weight, and then some more, committed to never being hungry for anything. Increasingly thin, she marries a man who fell in love with her when she was fat, and we watch him wish, sometimes, that she were still that girl: now, Elizabeth’s life—by this point, she’s Elizabeth—is dedicated to the maintenance of her hard-won figure, displayed in tight, joyless cocktail dresses. She’s trapped by her body, whatever size she is, and the shame of her own physical existence is isolating, a lens that filters every interaction. But it’s too simple to say that this is a novel “about” body image and self-hatred and the systemic oppression of women (though that wouldn’t be totally wrong); in Lizzie, Awad has created a character too vivid, too complicated, and too fundamentally human to be reduced to a single moral. Lizzie's particular sadness is unsettlingly sharp: she gets under your skin, and she stays there.
Beautifully constructed; a devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312848-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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