Did these things happen? Is Mathews really Jonathan Hemlock? This isn’t much help in answering such questions, but it’s a...
Hang out with spies in distant Asian capitals, offend French communists, smoke ever so slightly expensive cigars, have no visible means of support—and the locals are likely to ask questions about a person.
So Mathews (The Human Country, 2002, etc.), expatriate novelist, learns. Well before 1973, his annus mirabilis, sundry residents of Paris suspected him of being a CIA agent, assuring him that it didn’t really matter but pleading that he confide the truth in them. “It hurt to be thought of as a spook,” Mathews writes. “Not because by that time it had become shameful but because it was simply wrong.” Farther afield, Mathews relates in a wonderful anecdote, a Filipino doctor reaches the same hurtful conclusion; when Mathews protests that he’s a writer and quotes verbatim from the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of proof, the doctor responds, “How glad I am to see that the CIA is training its men so well.” An unlikelier agent there probably has never been: Mathews, after all, is the only American to have been invited into Oulipo, the French literature-meets-science movement whose best-known exemplar is Georges Perec’s “full-length novel in which the letter e never appeared,” and in 1973 Mathews was occupying himself with progressive causes and, from time to time, explicating the bad-capitalism twists and turns of what the French were calling le ouateurguète, Watergate. (“There was a lot of arguing among members of the audience. This helped me look sober and well-informed, which I certainly wasn’t.”) One of Mathews’s literary champions, though, turns out to be a chap who just happens to work for Zapata Oil, owned by George H.W. Bush, a man with, yes, close connections to the CIA. Unlikely, too, are the twists and turns his fictional memoir takes, punctuated by little cloak-and-dagger episodes and even a spectacular moment of wetwork among the wine-and-cheese picnics al fresco.
Did these things happen? Is Mathews really Jonathan Hemlock? This isn’t much help in answering such questions, but it’s a lot of fun.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-56478-392-8
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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