In a swarming of images, bright diversions, and symbolism which seems to flip belly-up before your eyes, Calisher again stirs toward coherence but lands mostly among impressive isles of total chaos. Lexie, from teenager to matron, begins and ends the story on the two banks of the Hudson. In a 4:00 a.m. N.Y, harbor pier-side wrangle with her parents, Lexie begins her "voyage to the interior" by reaching out to the "city" she'd heard about from her father—her own erogenous zone. The penetration of her "empty space," as she looks for her own "special language," proceeds 30 miles up the Hudson River, where she lives—as wife, mother, and lover—in a Victorian mansion. After years of young children ("love buttered") and fabled neighbors' enchanted nights (a swimming pool "bobbing with pale-gold oval faces"), Lexie takes a trip that stops just short of the bridge to that city (O-ho) and finally finds the perfect meld of dominance and submission in sex. The close is a serio/comic vision, with the suburban matron and her estranged husband nude on the grass, viewed by their grown children who are plotting escape from the family tower—after an attempted suicide by one and hints of incest. Now Lexie, presumably having settled the matter of what is solely female and what is personal ("In her relationships with men. . . have they been with herself?") rears up like "a dinosaur on the edge of extinction" and yells out: "Ah! I give birth to them. The women. Him. All Awareness. . . ." For the reader who goes the distance on this slow, muddy, but tantalizing track—Distance is the key. Back off and you'll spy the themes and counter-themes, you'll hear the horns of serf-land gently blowing on the Hudson. Ahhhhhh! or Arghhhhh!, depending on your stamina, and Calisher experience.a
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1977
ISBN: 0425039366
Page Count: -
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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