A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom.
St. Aubyn moves on from a troubled King Lear type (Dunbar, 2017) to characters with greater problems still concerning life, death, and figuring out how much caviar and cocaine are enough.
This is a novel of ideas—more specifically, the idea that somehow the world can be saved, whether through rewilding a patch of English forest or employing virtual reality to battle schizophrenia. Everyone involved represents an aspect of mind, from Sebastian, a young man battling mental illness, to Lucy, a principal player who has a frightening encounter with a tumor. Her sympathetic surgeon is of help: When Lucy, brilliant at both science and business, asks if she should avoid any kind of activity, given her condition, he replies, “My only advice is not to drink a case of champagne and go swimming at night in shark-infested waters.” That’s good advice under any circumstances. Lucy swims in the sharky waters of venture capital, working for a man suggestively named Hunter Sterling, who uses his brain and infinite fortune both to execute forward-looking mergers and acquisitions and to explore just about every narcotic there is, a habit that opens the way for moments of bad personal judgment and vulnerability, as when a greedy associate, urged by his wife and sensing the boss’s addictive behavior, tries to engineer a financial coup: “Money had turned his nervously cheerful, basically shy, nerd of a wife into Lady Macbeth.” Even the pure-hearted, ecological character called Francis—think Assisi, which figures in St. Aubyn’s elegant, carefully plotted tale—isn’t above the human fray; he’s ostensibly the faithful lover of Olivia, Lucy’s best friend, but he gets tangled up with a rich investor, which gives the story a bit of erotic frisson and some attention to our vile bodies just at a time when the characters are exploring the higher mysteries of the mind. More humorous but just as intellectually inclined as Richard Powers and David Mitchell, among other contemporaries, St. Aubyn explores human foibles even as he brilliantly takes up headier issues of the human brain in sickness and in health.
A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-28219-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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