A flawed but engaging novel about a romantically fraught period abroad.
In Hess’ literary novella, a man in the midst of a marital crisis looks to a decades-old diary for guidance.
Married Manhattanites Brant and Lloyd have temporarily moved to Delhi for Lloyd’s work. They should be having the time of their lives in the beautiful, ancient city, but Brant is consumed by grief and guilt: grief over the recent death of his mother and guilt that his grief drove him to cheat on Lloyd with another man. While Lloyd works, Brant gardens, until one day he discovers an old diary buried in the dirt. Written in 1945, it’s the account of a woman named Carol, who also found herself in Delhi due to her husband’s job. “He hasn’t touched me in a year,” writes Carol. “I hate him for that. I blame it on his work, but who knows. I’ve stopped trying. My mother told me sex was the least important part of a happy marriage. I’m really stuck here.” Brant becomes absorbed by Carol’s tale and its similarities to his own life, but when reading of Carol’s infidelity leads Brant to confess his own affair to Lloyd, he finds his story and Carol’s increasingly—and disastrously—intertwined. Hess’ deliberate prose effectively captures Brant’s emotional state, as when he excavates the diary: “The sun burned and he dug quickly seeing the back, the edges, the circumference. He pressed away more earth, then wrenched the thing free. It was sheathed in plastic, protected from the elements like some sacred text. He held it in his hands and it felt warm, pulsing with life.” The plot is a bit too contrived, unfortunately. Despite imbuing the journal with great significance (and having nothing better to do all day), Brant seems to read the diary over the course of many weeks instead of all at once. The story twists and heightens in a way that buoys the reader along, but it fails to leave an emotional impression.
A flawed but engaging novel about a romantically fraught period abroad.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781608642670
Page Count: 130
Publisher: REBEL SATORI PRESS
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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