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THE ITALIAN TEACHER

Name: THE ITALIAN TEACHER
Author: Tom Rachman
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2269-4

by Tom Rachman ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2018

A sensitive look at complicated relationships that’s especially notable for the fascinatingly conflicted protagonist.

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In his poignant latest, Rachman (The Rise & Fall of Great Powers, 2014, etc.) examines a life dominated by someone else’s art.

Pinch worships his father, noted painter Bear Bavinsky, although Bear’s behavior amply justifies the warning of Pinch's stepsister Birdie, daughter of the wife discarded for Pinch’s mother, Natalie: “Everything’s always about his art....He doesn’t hardly care about his actual creations…the human ones.” By the time Pinch is 15 in 1965, Bear has moved back to America from Italy and on to a third wife and more kids (eventual total: 17). Stuck in Rome with the increasingly unstable Natalie, Pinch desperately wants to stay connected to his elusive father. Rachman perfectly nails the charm with which Bear cloaks his selfishness and keeps his needy son both at a distance and firmly under his thumb. Bear skillfully deflects Pinch’s plea to come live with him by saying it wouldn’t be fair to Natalie and passes a devastating judgment on the boy’s fledgling paintings: “You’re not an artist. And you never will be.” Pinch goes to college in Toronto, planning to become an art historian and write his father’s biography, and it seems this will be the story of an impossible parent destroying a vulnerable offspring, especially after Bear sabotages Pinch’s first serious love affair and Pinch winds up teaching Italian at a Berlitz-style language school in London. But the balance of power between them shifts over the years in Rachman’s subtle rendering. Bear’s reputation goes into eclipse, and he confides the unsold paintings in his remote French cottage to Pinch, whom he trusts to protect his legacy. The way Pinch claims some turf for himself while remaining entangled in Bear’s shadow leads to an ironic conclusion that also shimmers with love and regret. Pinch’s best friend and late-in-life lover, two of the novel’s many finely rendered secondary characters, drink a rueful toast to a man who refused to be anyone’s victim—except maybe his own.

A sensitive look at complicated relationships that’s especially notable for the fascinatingly conflicted protagonist.

Pub Date: March 20, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-7352-2269-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE IMPOSTERS
by Tom Rachman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RISE & FALL OF GREAT POWERS
by Tom Rachman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS
by Tom Rachman

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE
by Lisa Jewell

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FAMILY REMAINS
by Lisa Jewell

- BOOK REVIEW
INVISIBLE GIRL
by Lisa Jewell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.