From Publishers Weekly
As complicated in narrative structure as a novel by Donald Barthelme, a writer with whom Koch has studied, this first novel is a portrait of a woman, Elise, and her circle. Set partly in Elise's 1950s childhood in a small town, partly in the 1980s, and partly in the year 2015, the narrative offers a baroque frieze of past and future intertwined in the explication of Elise's life. Her great-grandfather was a three-time murderer; the men in her life are mostly drug-dealing untrustables; most of the women in the cast of characters who now live together in a commune of sorts, Elise included, have sexual relationships with one another. How these elements fit together is perhaps clearer to the author than to the reader. However impressive in its sweep and depth of poetic language, the novel's central flaw is its lack of accessibility. Koch is a writer who is better at transmitting an inchoatehave added these words to help clarify sense of significance is not what the reviewer is saying.I have restored original than at making the significant easily understood.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The most powerful chapters in newcomer Koch's novel create (with many effusive, startling details) a tangible atmosphere where her characters live and breathe. As we travel through Koch's time machine, however, many of those succinctly powerful moments get diluted. The plot, told from a teeming number of perspectives, is confusing from the onset. Elise is first presented in a futuristic (the year is 2015), post-new world order society where she works as a "self-absorbed microbiologist." From there we jump from 1956, to 1984, and to other times and places in between. The point of the novel seems to be what life events made Elise this numb, and what the outcome of a society is in which nihilistic values render everything insignificant. But the plot unfolds in so many fits and starts that it is hard to be certain, and these questions are never adequately resolved.
- Lauren Bielski, New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Lauren Bielski, New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
