The British author who in such accomplished books as The Five Gates of Hell (1991) and Soft! (1998) has perfected the kind of noir thriller Graham Greene used to write now outdoes himself with this absorbing tale of captivity and obsession. Thomson’s protagonist is a nameless Englishman who has found fame and fulfillment in Amsterdam as a dancer and choreographer, and who is the lover of his beautiful partner Brigitte. Leaving their apartment one evening on an errand, he is met by “three figures in hoods and cloaks”—women admirers, it seems. But the three drug and kidnap him, chaining him to the floor of an almost empty room (whose only furnishings, oddly enough, are a washer and dryer) where he is kept naked, sexually used, subjected to genital mutilation, forced to perform a ballet of his own choosing before an audience of unidentified spectators, then released after 18 days. Though Thomson never explains his experience, symbolic reasons suggest themselves when the dancer begins “to feel as if his fate was no more or less than he deserved,” and it is suggested that his (usually masked) captors— domination of him dramatizes “the damage that had once been done to them now finding expression in clandestine rituals, barbarity, a pursuit of the bizarre.” The nature of his subsequent “freedom” is equally cryptic. The end of his relationship with Brigitte (to whom he cannot tell his story), an unexpected legacy that enables him to travel widely, his surrender to compulsive promiscuity, and a rash act that can only be interpreted as attempted rape—all are ironically logical outgrowths of his desire to find the women who altered his life and to understand the person he has become (or has perhaps, without realizing so, always been). The psychodrama Thomson builds from these fascinating particulars is an ineffably disturbing “revelation” of the possibilities and dangers we unknowingly carry within ourselves. One of the most eerily original novels of recent years. Thomson’s masterpiece.
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40927-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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