Arch, wry, and quip-ready characters can’t pump up a flaccid tale.
A rabbinical school dropout’s quarter-life passage is trip-wired with bombastic Boomers—in Naked City columnist Sohn’s overwrought second (after Run Catch Kiss, 1999).
Rachel decides to abort her career as a rabbi when a sick man she’s consoling dies critiquing her bedside manner. From there, it’s on to a new calling as bartender to a south Brooklyn gaggle of soulful misfits. Rachel’s lust life picks up when an actor friend introduces her to 48-and-holding cult filmmaker-turned-navel-gazing playwright Hank Powell. Although a super-goy, Hank could be Noel Airman to Rachel’s Marjorie Morningstar, except that Rach is no innocent and Hank’s only visible dramatic talent is crafting sexual scenarios. Perhaps our first-person protagonist should be excused for not noticing right away that Hank is a narcisso-sadist who wants only an inflatable doll, not a human, for a mate. After all, she must expend a considerable amount of energy peppering every page with double-entendres, wisecracks, and bons mots that often land with a thud (“She was the stink bomb of sex bombs”). Arguably worse, the Rachster’s mother has segued from consciousness-raising to menopause support groups seemingly overnight, and her 55-year-old father is doing the horizontal mambo with Rachel’s upstairs neighbor and former friend Liz. Rachel’s Oedipal dilemma is underscored when she has to decide whether or not to tell her mother (who must have missed American Beauty) why her paunchy unemployed father is suddenly doing sit-ups. Sohn’s Cobble Hill is so small an enclave that Rach can walk to her dress-to-order assignations with Hank and right into his boiler/bondage room—so insular a neighborhood, in fact, that the plot is powered largely by chance encounters, making the reader, along with Rachel, yearn to take the action off-borough. Slutwear, sex act-ronyms, and Boomer-bashing abound until Rachel wises up, Mom gets her power surge, and Dad’s comeuppance/epiphany narrowly escapes being an “Aw-w-w” ending.
Arch, wry, and quip-ready characters can’t pump up a flaccid tale.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3828-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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