A mixed bunch, a little below last year’s standard. (Not seen: pieces by Jon Gertner, Paula Peterson, and David Sedaris.)
The third in this catchall series is weighted toward fiction and has an international flavor.
Included are two cartoons and four nonfiction pieces: David Mamet’s notes on language, “Secret Names,” suggestive but in need of shaping; Michael Hall’s “Running For His Life,” a stirring tribute to an ethnic cleansing survivor from Burundi, now an ace runner/coach in Texas; Michael Paterniti’s workmanlike account of an Iranian living in a Paris airport for 15 years (“The Fifteen-Year Layover”); and Transmissions From Camp Trans, Michelle Tea’s long examination of prejudice against transsexuals among feminists that gets bogged down in its convoluted sexual politics. The fiction has more of a sheen, including three very strong stories with foreign settings. “Half of a Yellow Sun,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a heartbreaking evocation of the 1960s rise and fall of Biafra; Daniel Alarcón’s “City of Clowns” provides a memorable portrait of turbulent family life in Lima, Peru; and Gina Ochsner’s “Hidden Lives of Lakes” is a sweet fantasy about the allure of the afterlife for some ordinary Russians. Looking for something quintessentially American? Try the always-dependable Christopher Buckley’s “We Have a Pope!” (a juicy account of a p.r. campaign for an American pope), or Lance Olsen’s “Sixteen Jackies”: far away from the tabloid versions of Jackie Kennedy, the one true Jackie, all 246 pounds of her, is kicking back in her Caribbean hideaway. Some editorial judgments are puzzling. Why include Thom Jones’s ho-hum study of craziness (“Night Train”) when you already have the brilliant and terrifying portrayal of a father’s madness infecting his son (Ben Ehrenreich’s “What You Eat”)? And we don’t need both John Haskell’s “Good World” and Tom Kealey’s “Bones,” experimental offerings with similar structures. With family life, however, the range is impressive, from tight-knit Orthodox Jews (Julie Orringer’s “The Smoothest Way is Full Of Stones”) to the failed family that sells its babies (“The Promise of Something,” by Cheryl Printup).
A mixed bunch, a little below last year’s standard. (Not seen: pieces by Jon Gertner, Paula Peterson, and David Sedaris.)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-34122-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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