Despite an eerily captivating villain in the person of Dick Dart, an ultimately tedious odyssey—unredeemed by its quixotic...
A plucky heroine is forced to distinguish between literary illusion and existential reality in this murky sins-of-the-father metafiction from Straub (The Throat, 1993, etc.).
Vaguely discontented with her marriage to a 40-year-old manchild named Davey, ten years her junior, Nora Chancel (who served as a frontline nurse during the Vietnam War) resolves to turn their lives around. Barring the way to any immediate breakaway, however, is Alden, her domineering father-in-law and head of the publishing house that employs Davey. Along with several generations of devoted readers, moreover, Davey is mesmerized by Night Journey, an allusive allegory whose perennial bestseller status has sustained the family firm down through the years. Meanwhile, the brutal murders of four well-to-do divorcées and widows (all in their middle or late 40s) rock the upscale Connecticut exurb in which the Chancels all reside. The culprit turns out to be Dick Dart, a local attorney and former classmate of Davey's at Yale. A remorseless and resourceful monster with a wealth of grievances, Dart soon escapes from the town jail with Nora in tow. The fugitive, who's been killing off clients to undermine his father's law practice, is also pursuing a brand-new agenda: to prove that Hugo Driver, the long-dead author of Night Journey, did not actually write the book. Though on the run through backcountry New England, he and Nora manage to gather a considerable amount of testimony in support of his thesis. The final proofs are unearthed at a sometime writers' colony, where Nora wastes the sporadically charming but consistently vicious Dart in a climactic and bloody confrontation. After a hellish ten-day journey, then, she returns home to dump hapless Davey—and put paid to Chancel House.
Despite an eerily captivating villain in the person of Dick Dart, an ultimately tedious odyssey—unredeemed by its quixotic quests for the truth about times long past.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-40137-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
IN THE NEWS
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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