The absence of a formal plot may frustrate many readers. But for those who hear the music of its elegant rhetoric, the...
The enigmatic confluence of memory and imagination is explored with teasing subtlety in this 11th novel from Banville, the Irish author of such intensely stylized fiction as The Book of Evidence (1990) and The Untouchable (1997).
The narrator and central (indeed, only fully developed) character is Alex Cleave, a middle-aged stage actor who walks away from his current play to return to the house he grew up in, vacant since his widowed mother’s recent death. As if enacting his surname’s contrary meanings, Cleave embraces the past (which visits him in the form of various “ghosts”) while simultaneously sundering relationships with the wife (Leah, whom he has renamed “Lydia”) he has left and the emotionally disturbed daughter (Cass) from whom he had grown increasingly estranged. Banville portrays Cleave as a wary egoist (“I am all inwardness,” he muses) who prefers “appearing” as a player in imaginary people’s lives to interacting with real ones. An unoriginal concept, but the story isn’t clichéd, because this insecure solipsist’s uncertain relation to reality is expressed in finely honed sentences graced by arresting metaphors (a new mother emerges from the hospital “blinking like a prisoner led up from the dungeons”) and refracted through an indistinct fictional texture located somewhere between dreaming and waking. Furthermore, Banville surrounds his protagonist with both hazily remembered figures from his past and such quizzical people as the house’s vaguely menacing caretaker Quirke and its “housekeeper,” Quirke’s teenaged daughter Lily, whose identity becomes confused—as much in the reader’s mind as in Cleave’s—with the troubling remembered image of Cass, which appears to fade in harmony with the total solar eclipse that occurs near the climax.
The absence of a formal plot may frustrate many readers. But for those who hear the music of its elegant rhetoric, the encompassing dark of Eclipse may well seem light enough.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41129-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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