So absurdly improbable that it can be swallowed whole: a witty spoof, nicely put together and hard to put down.
In a comedy of errors from second-novelist McPhee (The Center of Things, 2001), two sisters set out to dig up a family secret and find that they’ve struck a mother lode of them.
Lillian and Veronica Moore, although both fully grown and quite independent young women, enjoy a strongly familial relationship of the sort that sisters more typically have in their teens than their 30s. A good thing, too, since each is about the only thing the other has by way of family. Their father Charles died in a car accident 25 years ago (Veronica was with him but survived), and their mother Agnes moved to New Zealand more than a dozen years back and isn’t often in touch. Lillian, a neurologist, has given up on marriage and recently duped an unemployed actor into getting her pregnant during a one-night stand. Veronica, who writes for a TV soap opera and knows all about such plot twists, understands her sister’s frustration but still thinks this was kind of low. Together, the two hire a private detective to straighten out the mystery of their late father: where he’s buried (Agnes refused to tell them), where he was going at the time of the accident, and what he did for a living (another secret Mother won’t tell). The detective is frank: He’ll probably never find anything, and if he does it will most likely be something horrible or scandalous. But Lillian and Veronica can deal with scandal. For one thing, the hapless chump who impregnated Lillian (without knowing it) landed a part in Veronica’s show and the two (the chump and Veronica, not the chump and Lillian) have started dating. For another, Veronica and Lillian may not be sisters. And their father may not have been their father. Is this some sort of postmodern whodunit? Not exactly—more like an old-fashioned farce.
So absurdly improbable that it can be swallowed whole: a witty spoof, nicely put together and hard to put down.Pub Date: June 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6072-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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