A thoughtful, engaging meditation on the intersection of artistic and spiritual integrity.
A successful but cynical and discontented artist gets a peculiar commission and a shot at moral redemption in this novel.
Martin Drake is a world-renowned artist, celebrated for his work as a sculptor of mostly abstract pieces. As a result of his fame, he leads a life of indulgent prodigality in New York City, one as luxurious as it is obscene and empty. But despite his acclaim, he’s disgusted with his own life and believes himself a fraud who abandoned his artistic principles for commercial accomplishments. At yet another winning exhibition, billionaire Harry Banks offers him a strange proposition. In exchange for a whopping $1 million, Martin must accept a commission to produce a sculpture of the face of God for Father Manoel da Silva Teixeira, a priest who is a “devoted crusader for the underclass” in Brazil. Father Manoel is horrified—he sees Martin’s art as profane trash, a soulless exercise in adolescent sacrilege. As offended as Martin is by Father Manoel’s assessment—one shared by Harry—the sculptor accepts the commission for the sake of the money. Brewer sensitively depicts the opportunity for moral and artistic reform this gives Martin as well as the daunting difficulty of the sculpture itself: “Trying to display all that God was, in one certain form, would be like trying to capture the sea in a teardrop, but infinitely more difficult. The most gifted visionary would fall far short. God was beyond comprehension.”
The author delicately limns Martin’s downward spiral into a life of ignoble dissipation, one marked by extraordinary self-debasement as well as the terrible loss of love. And Father Manoel is presented as much more than “a Bible-thumping Amazonian.” The priest astutely sees, under a surface of artistic debauchery, a deep reserve of genuine potential in Martin’s work: “They were grotesque, and clearly they were manifestations of an angry psyche straining for truth ever-further in the wrong direction. But there was something else to those bronzes: although they were ugly and malformed, they showed something more—a tremendous raw talent.” Still, Brewer’s story is far too condensed—under 250 pages—to have time to develop Martin’s reversal of character, a metamorphosis that is delivered too quickly and is therefore as implausible as his commission. Especially given the depths of Martin’s moral depravity—depths deftly, affectingly described by the author—readers are led to expect a tougher slog toward enlightenment. In addition, Brewer’s writing can mix florid overstatement with shopworn clichés. Consider this depiction of one of Martin’s sculptures: “Etched with the beauty and wisdom of the ages, glowing with a power beyond the realm of understanding, it was he himself that stared back.” Nevertheless, the author provides an intriguing critique of the contemporary art world—subsumed by money and careerism, it conflates the ostentatiously reprobate with edgy creativity. Furthermore, Brewer manages to pull off a difficult trick—he has composed a deeply religious novel that wears its spirituality lightly. While the book revolves around the redemptive powers promised by a submission to God, it avoids tendentious sermonizing.
A thoughtful, engaging meditation on the intersection of artistic and spiritual integrity.Pub Date: June 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-534788-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Goldtouch Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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