J.C. Leyendecker, Couple Descending Stairs(April 22) Underwhelming. I picked this up because I enjoyed Bel Canto so much. It can barely hold a candle to it, but it wasn’t as terribly disappointing as Housekeeping was after Gilead.
It reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s lesser works: an impossibly beautiful woman, a genius and a loner, suffers a life-altering loss, travels to a foreign part of the U.S. and faces all kinds of truths about herself. Ho hum. I find these hard to believe at the best of times – the heroines never seem to do too much before everyone is eating out of their hands and acknowledging their intellectual superiority – but this version is particularly incredible because the beautiful genius loner woman who travels to Nebraska is supposed to be a magician’s assistant who was in love with a gay man for 20 years, and there is nothing about Sabine Parsifal that is convincing as either a magician’s assistant or a sexual misfit.
There is a little bit of Fargo shock in this novel but it’s not enough to lift it out of apprentice-novelist territory.
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