Review: The Orchid Hour

The Orchid Hour reeks, but in the best possible way. It reeks with the smell of lasagna in Little Italy, the smell of cheap gin in a 1920s speakeasy, and most importantly and most delicately with the scent of orchids at midnight. It reeks of sleazy dodges, flimsy aliases, and multiple murders.The Orchid Hour masquerades as a murder mystery, and it’s satisfying at that level, but underneath that layer, there’s another that’s a love story, and when all those layers are peeled away, it’s a coming-of-age story.

But our hero isn’t a child, not even a teen-ager. She's an Italian-American widow and mother who’s nearly thirty, in a time (not so long ago) when a woman was supposed to have no desires of her own, but only the family’s. When a girl had no girlhood, and a woman was defined only by her place in the family.
That’s where we find Zia de Luca at the opening of the novel, working at her day job at the library, her hair done up in a bun, wearing sensible shoes, going home to do the books for her father-in-law’s cheese shop and looking after her eight-year-old son.
But the first murder puts paid to that, and the second murder sets Zia on the path of vengeance, a path to New York’s nascent criminal under-world, and a path to self-discovery and self-transformation. To a time which will only last as long as the vagrant scent of the orchid, but a time which will change her life forever.

Told not only through Zia’s eyes, but that of the NYPD officer who tries his best to help her and a gangster who sees murder as a simple career opportunity, this novel encompasses New York, 1923 in all its glory and grime, from City Hall to Little Italy, from Greenwich Village to the Great White Way. Thanks to Bilyeu’s masterful hand, we step out into the wilds of New York with Zia. Maybe we’ll find love. Maybe we’ll find ourselves, by being taken out of ourselves.

This is Nancy Bilyeau’s eighth book, her best by far, and she’d already set a high bar. What are you waiting for? Pick it up now.

A foggy history

 ”

 "Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck."

--Charles Dickens. Bleak House

I came across this article in the Guardian the other day titled “Dickens exhibition to look at role of London fog in life and in writings." 

Ta Da!

 

It’s officially official

I would have posted it sooner, buy I didn’t know where to find it.

Review: Blue Skies

 

I've decided to add a few book reviews to the blog, especially for new books, including books which may not yet have hit the stands yet (through the good graces of Netgalley. For my inaugural review, I've selected T.C. Boyle's eco-black comedy, Blue Skies.

 Of Blue Skies I am two minds, as perhaps was T.C. Boyle when he set down to write this book. A simple family tale or a polemic on climate change? Are the characters agents of their own actions, or has climate change replaced fate as the controller of lives? Are we doomed by our past actions, or do we simply make do?

 It’s a plodding plot, not so much a plot as a situation—situation dystopia. The world is seen alternately through the eyes of earnest mother Ottile (the wife of a doctor, comfortably middle-class) and her grown children, the somewhat superficial daughter Cat, and son Cooper, an entomologist and the Cassandra figure of the tale. Cat lives with fiancé Todd in Florida, while he other two are in California. One coast in perpetual drought and the other perpetually water-logged. Whole neighborhoods go up in flames on one coast while whole neighborhoods are reclaimed by the sea on the others.

The setting is not some future dystopia, but the dystopia of today and perhaps the next eight or so years in the future. The story captures the mundanity of experience at the end of the world. Sundowners and king tides (two weather phenomena I’m not familiar with, but apparently soon will be) intrude on the rituals which mark our lives, marriages and births and deaths. There are moments of joy and tragedy, as in any lives, and whether those tragedies are caused by a collapsing planet or human inertia and hubris is rather fuzzy.

 This was by no means a slog to read. The story is underpinned by diamond-hard prose which is a pleasure to read. Characters are fully realized and complex. Perhaps it’s the author’s ambivalence, whether our world is truly at an end, or whether we can survive on cricket cookbooks and drones for pollinating our crops, that leaves me scratching my head. We’ll all muddle through somehow.