Irish writer Bennett’s third novel but first to appear here: a despairing but acute examination of a souring love affair and its ambiguous effect on certain nefarious characters pushing the Belgian Congo toward independence. Dour, alienated Irish novelist James Gillespie comes to the Belgian Congo in 1959 to renew affections with his Italian lover Inäs, an idealistic reporter for an Italian Communist journal who has been apart from him long enough for Gillespie to sense that there may be another taking his place. At first Gillespie is content to follow Inäs as she flits happily from boozy white-upperclass cocktail parties to the stinking, grimly impoverished black quarter of LÇopoldville. Careless of quotes, facts, on-site research and anything else that would jeopardize her one-sided reportage of Belgian exploitation, Inäs drifts ever closer to the camp of independence advocate Patrice Lumumba, the same man favored by easy-going American diplomatic attachÇ, Mark Stipe. Though Inäs warns Gillespie that Stipe is a CIA agent, Gillespie, after being flattered that Stipe may have actually read one of his novels, lets the agent feed him information that the novelist incorporates into a series of unnaturally prescient magazine articles about the independence movements. These bring Gillespie a small degree of money and fame, but they alienate Inäs, sending Gillespie into bouts of dark depression. She mocks him as a catastrophist(a person for whom every change is an absolute disaster) and takes up with Stipe’s African chauffeur, Auguste, a Lumumba supporter far wiser than he seems; then eventually, when Lumumba flirts with Communism, she dumps Stipe altogether. Gillespie beds the blasÇ wife of a Belgian industrialist, pines for Inäs, but finishes his novel—when Inäs appears suddenly on his doorstep asking that he help smuggle her, Auguste, and Lumumba out of the country. A relentlessly downbeat portrait of the artist as a whiney, self-pitying failure. Lightened with spicy sex scenes and absurdist accounts of colonialism at the edge of extinction.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86334-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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