The same structural shakiness that undermined A Midnight Clear and Scumbler affects this new Wharton effort: an overwhelming metaphor soaks through the otherwise crisp-enough narrative, making it soggy (here it's actually a double story, joined) and, worse, utterly pre-ordained. Wharton's a good enough novelist to keep you hoping this wet and shaggy theme will stand, shake itself off, and surprise you—yet it doesn't happen. The two complementary plots? In the summer of 1938, a Philadelphia factory worker, getting too much heat because of his union activities, spirits his young family off to Wildwood, New Jersey, for an unscheduled vacation (the kids have been threatened by company goons). Appearing on the boardwalk that summer is a motorcycle/animal act owned by a WW I hero, an ex-car-racer named Sture Modig. "The Wall of Death" features a wooden ramp/pit, whirling cycles (ridden by Sture and a younger man—who also is sleeping with Sture's wife) and Tuffy, who rides in a sidecar and is a lion that Sture has had since it was a cub. How the narrator of half the book, Dickie Kettleson, son of the factory worker, finally has a fateful hand in the (disastrous) freeing of Tuffy is the eventual braid here. But you've seen it coming from the beginning, is the problem: the title has given it all away, even: Pride—pride of lions, pride of family, of work, of protectiveness, of bravery. Wharton does try to shadow it a little, with the eerily effective sub-metaphors he's so good at, usually interiors of different kinds: the Wall of Death, sand castles on the beach, the box Dickie keeps his kitten in (who's a minor Tuffy, all too obviously)—but the main man/lion contrast rolls ponderously over all that (Wharton even interweaves a chapter on the behavior of lions in the wild—in case someone's been napping). The inertness of the theme will in the end completely stave in the book, allowing it little of Birdy's or Dad's plain mysteriousness. Still and all, Wharton remains the contemporary novelist perhaps closest to what could be called Frank Capra-style American storytelling: class-conscious, do-an-honest-job, optimistic, loving. Pride, like all his other books, is imbued by these merits—and is scuttled only by its urge to italicize it all unnecessarily.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1985
ISBN: 1557042594
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
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
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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