nonfiction

“Dragnic avoids mawkishness by
keeping her focus on the ache of love and
on the difficulties of its fulfillment.”
from every day, every hour
become. Now, to celebrate his older son’s graduation from MIT,
Vic throws a grand Indian-style party at his Newport Beach
home to which he invites Frances, Jay and Lali. Jay comes from
an upper class Hindu family and seemed the golden boy in their
UCLA circle; Frances, the daughter of middle class Catholics
from Goa, felt lucky when they married. But UCLA was their
highpoint. Jay has never risen above middle management; Frances
struggles as a real estate agent during the economic downturn;
and their 11th-grade daughter’s grades have plummeted. If
Frances and Jay have chosen to live away from the Indian community
in a largely Jewish neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, Lali
has gone further afield. Originally from a Jacobite Syrian Christian
community in the Indian city of Cochin, Lali now lives in
San Francisco with her Jewish doctor husband, who has recently
begun exploring his religious roots. Feeling isolated, Lali has
drifted into an online flirtation with an Indian lover from her
past. Once the friends gather, emotions flare, and secrets come
to light. With the possible exception of Vic, these characters’
fallibilities only make them more likeable, particularly Jay and
Frances, whose futures Cherian (A Good Indian Wife, 2008) disappointingly
leaves the most unsettled.
A mostly entertaining, sometimes thoughtful, but not
terribly demanding Indian beach read. (Author tour to Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle)
EVERY DAY, EVERY HOUR
Dragnic, Nataša
Translated by Schillinger, Liesl
Viking (272 pp.)
$25.95 | May 28, 2012
978-0-670-02350-9
While no Romeo and Juliet, Luka and
Dora turn out to be lovers almost as starcrossed
as their Elizabethan counterparts.
Luka and Dora first meet in kindergarten
in the Croatian town of Makarska
when—shades of Dante and Beatrice—Luka faints at her
beauty and Dora awakens him with a kiss (and she’s only two).
She whispers to him that he’s her “prince,” a motif Dragnic reiterates
throughout the novel. Inseparable as children, the young
couple even experiences the jealousy of Ana, Luka’s younger
sister. But all Edens eventually come to an end, and so their
idyll changes when, as a young adolescent, Dora moves to Paris.
Meanwhile, Luka studies art in Zagreb, eventually linking up
with Klara, a model three years older than he. Klara is more
enthusiastic about the relationship than is Luka, but he nevertheless
becomes her somewhat reluctant lover. As his talents
flourish, an exhibit of his paintings is arranged in Paris where,
after a 16-year hiatus, he unexpectedly reunites with Dora. This
time there is no hesitation—they immediately become lovers
and are again inseparable. After three idyllic months together,
Luka returns to Croatia only to find that Klara is pregnant, supposedly
with his child, a charade Klara maintains for the next
16 years, further tethering Luka to her against his will. Periodically
he and Dora, who has studied the dramatic arts and is
experiencing some success in her own career as an actress, meet
up. But will they ever get together for good
Dragnic avoids mawkishness by keeping her focus on
the ache of love and on the difficulties of its fulfillment.
THE BLIND SPY
Dryden, Alex
Ecco/HarperCollins (416 pp.)
$24.99 | Mar. 1, 2012
978-0-06-208808-6
The U.S.S.R. has spun off into its
various republics, but Putin’s Russia is
having second thoughts about its loss of
the Ukraine.
In the midst of a plot to find a pretext
for re-conquest, a blind man named
Balthasar spies for the Russians. Balthasar has considerable
insights that amply compensate for his lack of vision. That he
can sense who approaches him and that he knows when a particular
person wears blue clothing strains credulity, but readers
can suspend disbelief for a while. It’s all about “the fallibility
of those who trust their eyes,” he says. A long-lost half sibling
named Anna Resnikov is a more interesting character. She
works for Cougar Intelligence Applications, a commercial firm
that is CIA-like, right down to its abbreviation. She is a former
KGB agent who defected to the West because...well, because.
Author Dryden (a pseudonym) displays considerable knowledge
of Russia and the Black Sea area and sketches believable pictures
of cities like Sevastopol. He’s wordy, though, and seems
to have an ongoing love affair with adverbs, for example, “Burt
said breezily,” “Burt replied stolidly” and “Burt said magnanimously.”
But the characters and the plot are intelligent, with a
series of twists and surprises right to the end. A climactic scene
with Anna and a train is especially spectacular and satisfying.
It’s good to see an East-West spy game that’s developed beyond
the Cold War Clancy clashes of the last century.
A decent book that could have been better, but thriller
aficionados will enjoy the complex tale regardless. (Events
in New Mexico)
SKINNYDIPPING
Frankel, Bethenny
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (368 pp.)
$25.00 | May 1, 2012
978-1-4516-6737-0
Reality queen Frankel expands her
brand with a roman à clef.
Recent NYU graduate Faith Brightstone,
determined to make it as an
actress, leaves Manhattan for Los Angeles.
Reluctantly welcomed by her distant
father, she befriends his live-in girlfriend Brooke, who introduces
Faith to the L.A. club scene. There follows an episodic,
summary-heavy narration of Faith’s encounters with men, old
and young, most of whom do nothing to advance her career or
enliven her love life. The exception is Vince Beck, a sexy producer
with an Aussie accent, but, unsurprisingly, he turns out to
be married. After two stints as personal assistant to the petty
tyrants that are so much a staple of Hollywood literature (in a
perhaps subliminal nod to Sunset Boulevard, one of Faith’s jobs
ends when a scriptwriter is found dead in her employer’s pool),
Faith cannot get a part—her weight, normal everywhere else, is
chubbette-grade in California. Embarking, with her cheerfully
bulimic roommate, on a starvation diet, she gets skinny then
finally gets cast—in a soft porn flick. So much for Hollywood
dreams. Part two finds Faith back in Manhattan five years later.
She’s turned her obsession with weight into a promising small
business. Her over-the-top repartee and entrepreneurial chops
garner the attention of the producers of Domestic Goddess, a
cable reality TV show hosted by Sybil Matthews, a fictional avatar
of Martha Stewart, only more diabolical. The remainder of
the book chronicles the usual reality show indignities as contestants
are ritually humiliated and eliminated, challenge by challenge.
Sybil already has Faith in her sights, since Faith has some
dirt on a fellow contestant and a history with the show’s executive
producer. What will the home and garden diva do when she
finds out her own son is Faith’s latest club conquest
Although the writing is competent, this novel illustrates
the main difficulty posed by “reality-based” fiction:
the inherent tedium of unedited real life, however glitzy
the surroundings.
BLUE MONDAY
French, Nicci
Pamela Dorman/
Viking (400 pp.)
$26.95 | Mar. 1, 2012
978-0-670-02336-3
More than 20 years after the unsolved
disappearance of a five-year-old London
girl, a little boy, also five, is abducted, reopening
old wounds for a police detective
and raising questions for a female psychiatrist—especially
after it is revealed that the prime suspect, a client
of hers, has an identical twin brother of whom he is unaware.
This is the first installment in a series of psychological thrillers
by French, pen name for the bestselling husband and wife duo
of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French (Land of the Living, 2003, etc.).
The appealing, strong-willed protagonist is Freida Klein, a single
woman in her 40s whose most intimate relationship is with the
shadowy city—notwithstanding a romantic fling that tempts her
for a few seconds to leave London. She has more than enough to
distract her from her private life. Her new patient, Alan, is a miserable
soul who is so desperate for a son he dreams of making off
with a boy who is the spitting image of the missing tyke. Detective
Chief Inspector Karlsson is leery of Freida’s concerns, and
resists new tests, but he slowly comes to value Freida’s theories.
Though a small leap of faith is required in the end, the surprises
and suspense never let up. The book provides fascinating psychological
insight. And the supporting characters, ranging from
a droll Polish laborer to Freida’s disheveled mentor, are warm,
intelligent and provide just the right amount of humor. Off-thebeaten-path
London is also a great character.
An absorbing psychological thriller that will leave you
anticipating the next installment. (Agents: Sarah Ballard and
Simon Trewin)
THE NEWLYWEDS
Freudenberger, Nell
Knopf (352 pp.)
$25.95 | May 1, 2012
978-0-307-26884-6
Freudenberger (The Dissident, 2006,
etc.) examines a marriage arranged via
the Internet.
They met on AsianEuro.com: Amina
wanted to escape from her family’s straitened
circumstances in Bangladesh; George wanted someone who
“did not play games, unlike some women he knew.” So here she
is, in the fall of 2005 in the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y., recently
married, working in retail while she studies for a teaching certificate.
Her husband seems nice, if a little fussy, but he hasn’t said
any more about converting to Islam as she promised her parents,
and they haven’t had a Muslim wedding yet either. More disconcerting
than any of that, though, is Amina’s sense that “she was
a different person in Bangla than she was in English,” and she’s
uncertain how to bridge the gulf between these two selves. She
makes a much-needed friend in George’s cousin Kim, who lived
for a while in Bombay and was briefly married to an Indian. Kim
understands more about Amina’s background and her conflicts
than anyone else in Rochester, so when it turns out that she and
George have been hiding something important from Amina, it’s
doubly shattering. However, it does prompt George to agree to
bring Amina’s parents to America, and she goes to collect them
in Bangladesh, where several old family conflicts flare anew.
Freudenberger does well in capturing the off-kilter feelings of a
young woman in a country so unlike her birthplace, and the cultural
differences prompt some enjoyably wry humor. The characters
are all well drawn, if a trifle pallid, which points to a larger
problem. Freudenberger’s tone is detached and cool throughout,
even when violent incidents are described, which makes it difficult
to emotionally engage with the story. The novel is carefully
researched rather than emotionally persuasive.
Well executed but a bit too obviously studied—more
willed than felt. (Author tour to Boston and New England, Los
Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle)
784 | 15 april 2012 | fiction | kirkusreviews.com |
| kirkusreviews.com | fiction | 15 april 2012 | 785