Oates has done time in academia, and the best part of this erratic novel—set among literary faculty at an upstate N.Y. college—are her descriptions, verging on dark farce, of professorial vanities, rivalries, insecurities, and petty tactics: much of the book involves a handful of faculty parties, and Oates efficiently captures the spilled drinks, bored wives, snide put-downs, labored jokes, oblique namecallings, faux pas, and hurt egos that characterize such sloshy gatherings. (At the first party, there's a ghastly moment when the guest of-honor—a great, aged, failing English poet—vomits at the climax of a vain young composer's eager-to-please performance at the piano.) And at least one of the strutting literati here—a self-important prof having an affair with a young teacher's insomniac wife (she's out to save her husband's job)-takes on a real tragicomic pathos in his desperately fawning attempt to win over the visiting poet, who'd rather chat with the folks at the public library. But Oates wants more from her cast than dark irony (which reaches its peak when the old poet bums to death after fiercely shooing the tireless sycophant out of his bedroom); she wants, as usual, fear and trembling. And the attempts here at tortured, soulful characterization are less successful: many of the players have fitful stream-of-consciousness moments, but it is 38-year-old novelist/teacher Brigit Stott, a vaguely autobiographical figure, who carries the emotional weight—in memories of her brutal former marriage, in her half-thwarted attachment to the old poet ("He would be one of her holy loves. She has had holy loves and unholy loves"), in her recurrent fear of being suicide-prone, and in her unconvincing affair with that vain young composer, a preening bisexual. With Brigit, who is made to reach some sort of unwarranted epiphany, Oates turns on her familiar tortured-soul prose ("Her stomach was bloated, hard, her brain was emptied of blood. . ."); but the character remains sketchy and out of place, like a study for some other, more focused novel. A mixed bag of Oates, then—insightful and sharp when it's content to view the academics with a satiric curl of the lip, but characteristically morbid-shallow when trying to reach into their very souls.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0449244571
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
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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