An ambitious tale of an anxious 50 years in New York City history.
Decades of New York City turmoil, filtered through one complicated family.
Barkan’s third novel centers on Mona Glass, Brooklynite, Jew, hotshot tennis player, and, as the story opens in the early 1970s, a fraud. She’s in love with Saul Plotz, the Queens borough director for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, but he’s already married; to appease (and deceive) her parents, the two stage their own wedding. Mona’s risk-taking extends to her career: At a friend’s urging, she takes a job as a photographer for an upstart tabloid, the Daily Raider, and snags an exclusive photo of Vengeance, a street vigilante who has both riled and thrilled New Yorkers. The novel, which stretches to the Covid-19 era, strives to be a widescreen, Franzen-esque study of the city’s crises as they entwine with Mona and Saul’s. Manhattan’s increasing wealth parallels the disintegration of Saul’s relationship with his unsuspecting wife, Felicia; the 9/11 attacks kill people close to both of them; a son Saul and Mona have together creates a further fracture in their relationship, and serves as a pathway to explore the city’s playground-for-the-wealthy callowness. Mona is a lively spitfire of a character—an excellent early set piece has her besting a smug man on the tennis court—and Barkan is a close student of New York history. (Early on, Saul takes a meeting with developer Fred Trump, attended by his teenage son, Donald.) The book feels overstuffed for its scope and at times predictable; it’s not hard to figure what will happen to the friends with jobs at the Twin Towers. And though a subplot about the extended life of Vengeance strains credulity, it provides some glue to the book’s everything-is-connected ethos. As Mona says: “Either everything in life is connected, or nothing is.”
An ambitious tale of an anxious 50 years in New York City history.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798218443351
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Tough Poets Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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