Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The drastic change of scene, though maybe necessary for artistic growth, has left Ali oddly adrift.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

The author roams through many voices and perspectives, but the characterizations are superficial. What’s lacking is the discipline that stand-alone stories might have imposed. Ali, so sure-footed in developing the immigrant Londoners of Brick Lane, seems at a loss to know what to do with him the same goes for Stanton and the Potts, who implausibly reform themselves.

Will he put Mamarrosa on the map? He arrives with a shaven head, a cape and enigmatic one-liners. Twenty-year-old Teresa, who works at a deli, is off to London to work as an au pair Marco, who left years ago and is rumored to have become a wealthy resort developer, is returning. Young Huw and Sophie have rented a house Sophie has a history of depression and is experiencing pre-wedding jitters. The sex-starved Stanton will bed mother and daughter both. The father is “on the run,” though we don’t know from what he has a doormat of a wife and a teenaged daughter who’s a slut. There’s the cynical middle-aged writer, Stanton, working on a novel about Blake, and his disreputable neighbors, the Potts. It’s an effective opening story, with its calm ruefulness, and a historical marker for Ali’s look at a contemporary Portuguese backwater, where traditional customs co-exist with cell phones and Internet cafes, and when foreigners (notably Brits) are trickling in. Rui was once tortured for his opposition to the Salazar dictatorship he had also, before his marriage, spent a night making love to Joao.

His lifelong friend Rui has hanged himself in the woods. Outside the village of Mamarrosa, Joao, an old peasant, makes a shocking discovery. The British Ali follows her stunning debut ( Brick Lane, 2003) with these linked stories set in a Portuguese village.Īlentejo is an agricultural region of Portugal.

Books by monica ali