Eight "little novels"—i.e., longish short stories—from the idiosyncratic author of strong short fiction and uneven novels; here, though none of the pieces is quite fully satisfying, the collection is only occasionally mired in the feverish imagery and lumbering verbiage that have seriously marred Calisher's recent work (On Keeping Women, Mysteries of Motion). The novella-length title story is one of the less successful entries, uneasily poised between comedy-of-manners (the Saratoga sporting set) and psychological closeup: the conflict-ridden marriage of bouncy horse-lover Tot and depressive, lame artist Nola—which somehow chugs along despite (or because of) their opposing sensibilities, their heavy loads of guilt. There's a similar, more satiric blend of milieu (upscale show-biz) and neurotic marriage (in the A Star is Born mode) in the brief "The Sound Track." And two other stories offer wildly contrasting views of New York City lifestyle: in the case-history-like "Survival Techniques," the narrator—a retired storekeeper living with his wife in a fine old midtown apartment-house—finds himself compelled to join the bag-ladies on his block ("I was not aiming to be pitiable, only never again to have to be a passerby"); in the fetching but overlong "The Tenth Child," the author reads an ad for a Park Ave. triplex ("Space for 1,000 Dresses and Room for Party for 100 Children")—and is quickly launched into an elaborate fantasy about the sort of family that would live in such a place. The other pieces, however, even if laced with contemporary details, are more personal, less social. "Real Impudence" is a slightly clinical, fairly wry study of eccentric relationships in a Greenwich Village menage. ("It's all a question of knowing who to latch onto.") "The Library" is a faintly soupy retrospective—about a charismatic Englishwoman who has just died, about the three Americans who loved her, becoming a "family of husbands." And the collection is rounded out by two first-person memoirs: a woman recalls her ambivalent feelings about her mother, her own ironic fate ("now I am you"), in "Gargantua"; "The Passenger"—the thoughts of a woman writer en route by train from Chicago to New York—is plainly autobiographical, rather formless, occasionally humorous. . . and often excessive. ("Peoples' agonies are like dunes I stumble in, always falling with my fangs in my own wrist.") Inventive, observant, murky, florid: the familiar mixed bag of Calisher virtues and drawbacks—but without the oppressive longueurs of her recent novels.
Pub Date: May 1, 1985
ISBN: 0385199759
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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