Epstein writes with intelligence, wit and flair—highly recommended.
Achingly beautiful stories of growing old, searching for meaning and facing death.
Epstein (In a Cardboard Belt!, 2007, etc.) creates his characters with deft strokes. The story that gives the collection its title is one of the author’s most typical, as well as one of his best. Three years earlier the somewhat Prufrockian Dr. A. Jerome Minkoff had lost his wife to Lou Gehrig’s disease, and at a fundraiser for ALS he meets Larissa Friedman, a rich and glamorous widow in similar circumstances. They fall into an energetic affair, and for the first time since his wife’s death Minkoff finds himself contemplating marriage. Larissa has much to offer, especially a gorgeous home in Los Angeles and megabucks—“All the happiness that money could buy.” But at a deep, intuitive level, Minkoff senses this relationship is not going to work. The good doctor is typical of Epstein’s anti-heroes: elderly, lonely, sensitive and looking to make decisions with a modicum of moral integrity. In “The Philosopher and the Checkout Girl,” for instance, a retired professor of analytical philosophy finds a connection with a checkout girl (albeit one pushing 50) that he never experienced with his former academic colleagues. In a neo-Jamesian epiphany the professor belatedly discovers that “he had never known the pleasure of guileless behavior, of saying precisely what he felt and acting on those feelings. He had lived his life at a second, perhaps a third, remove.”
Epstein writes with intelligence, wit and flair—highly recommended.Pub Date: June 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-72195-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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