![]() Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love-refracted through a short nightmare life-will end with her death. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister-found at last and redeemed. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away-as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood Paul D. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners-one "enlightened," one vicious. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway-near death with a newborn-and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. Full of a baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel-strong and intricate in craft devastating in impact. It doesn't help that, as an occasional screenwriter, Rubin tends to sketch his scenes sparsely-mostly dialogue and gesture-as though awaiting a director to fill in the rest.Ī strong debut that remains steadily written, even as it drifts away from its best material. As Giovanni drifts from New York into Hollywood, then into politics, then into therapy, the novel starts to feel diffuse, as though Rubin wants to do too much. ![]() ![]() Rubin excels at detailing the specifics of impersonation, as when Giovanni breaks down what different gestures mean-“nodding while breathing out your nose (to express amused agreement), raising your eyebrows while suppressing a smile (mild scandal), or shaking your head while breathing in through the mouth (sympathy)”-or when he discusses “the thread,” the aspect of personality that everybody has and on which a great impressionist pulls to begin unraveling the subject (“the thread” is a masterful governing metaphor). But Giovanni is the center, and he’s a complicated figure: a man who, in his attempt to perfectly mimic the characteristics of others, ultimately realizes he has no characteristics of his own. This old-fashioned, show-biz quality is one of the more appealing aspects of Rubin’s novel-there’s even a love interest named Lucy Starlight (a singer, of course) and a villainous theater owner named Bernard Apache. Finally pushed into the spotlight by a talent agent named Max, Giovanni becomes, pardon the cliché, the toast of the town, and one imagines an old-timey montage from a 1940s movie: newspaper headlines twirling, champagne corks popping, and hammy impresarios introducing the great impressionist upon stage after stage. Rubin’s debut novel tells an imaginative story of American emptiness.Įncouraged by his mother, Giovanni Bernini has nursed his gift of imitation since childhood, practicing on friends and teachers, always performing flawless facsimiles of those around him. ![]()
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