Customer Reviews

Martin Sloane

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I can't recall a recent book in which so many professional reviewers find so many different messages at the heart of the story... It's not that Redhill is vague or obscure; in fact, multiple messages are probably what he was hoping for.

Integrating all these themes into a deceptively simple story, Redhill emphasizes that for each of us, our past always shapes our understanding of the present. Martin Sloane, a fifty-ish artist who creates enigmatic boxes, and Jolene Iolas, a college student who falls in love with him and his artwork, speak to the reader unpretentiously about the past and present, and one quickly identifies with them, falling into the rhythm of their alternating voices. Martin's inexplicable disappearance from Jolene's apartment and Jolene's renewed search for him many years later provide a framework for the story, along with unlimited opportunities for the author to explore themes of love and loss, home and family, death and dying, childhood and memory, and, most of all, our personal identities as a result of our separate pasts. As the reader filters the separate and combined stories of Martin and Jolene through his/her own past experiences, s/he also distills from the author's themes whatever personal messages are relevant, pertinent, or even unique for him.

Redhill's background as a poet is obvious here. His ability to compress allows him to pack short scenes with big meanings, to ensure that every detail advances his story and themes, and to create fresh images which allow the reader to see common experiences in new ways. Wonderful, pithy observations keep the reader energized and involved on many levels, while an intriguing mystery maintains the suspense. Though a transition might help to avoid some minor confusion (eventually resolved) in a couple of scenes, and a few questions of character remain unresolved, this is an amazing debut novel, one of the year's most enjoyable for me. Mary Whipple

I read my first adult novel something over forty years ago. Since then I have read three or four books a week.

Martin Sloane is quite simply one of the finest novels I have ever read, crafted by a magnificent intelligence. Read it once for the story, then twice more page by page to pick up the textures and evocations and resonances. Then read it again - and again next year.

Martin Sloane is a novel worthy of the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Award, Governor's General Award and/or any other noteworthy award for distinctive, discriptive, and evocative literature. The novel tugs at the central core of the reader's heart and mind by taking you into the interior and intertwining lives of the main characters, Martin, Joleen, and Molly. The author, writes with deft clarity and an uncanny understanding of human foibles,and evokes powerful emotions of happiness and pain in the reader.

Martin is an artist with a deep and dark past with an erstwhile desire to come to grips with his past when he embarks upon a love affair with a young woman who might have been his soul-mate, had he allowed himself to accept the depth of her love and understanding. Unfortunately, the meddling and controlling influence of Molly, Joleen's best-friend dooms the relationship by grabbing at the fragile psyche of Martin through a jealous encounter with him when she attempts to expose to him his weaknesses and motivations during a visit to the couple's home after years of separation after college from Joleen. Molly, thereafter, embarks upon a vicarious desire to live through the lives of these two people by trying to re-establish a connection between them that spans from the US to Ireland all the while trying to mend her shattered friendship with Joleen. Joleen, glistens as the true survivor as all who read this book will find.

This is a novel worthy of reading for those who love good literature. Martin Sloane was a reading experience of exceptional magnitude that I did not beyond my wildest expectations hope to find between the covers of this marvelous novel when I purchased it.

Martin Sloane is a stunning first novel by Canadian poet, Michael Redhill. The fact that he is a poet first is obvious by the careful way he's crafted this book. Every line shows the care that a poet puts into his/her work. The book reminded me of Michael Ondaatje's work in a number of places and I'm sure it's because of the care with language they both take.

The story explores a number of important themes - the search for a home, the lifelong impact parents have on their children's lives, and above all, the nature of love. The question, " is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?" kept coming to my mind while reading this book. The reader will have to decide the answer as it pertains to this novel.

The book tells the story of the love relationship between Martin Sloane and Jolene Iolas, a woman thirty-five years his junior. We learn early on that Martin, one day, simply disappears without a word. The depth of the pain that Martin's unexplained and unexpected departure leaves Jolene with is at the centre of this novel. She is consumed for the next ten years of her life with the very human desire "just to know why."

Jolene searches for the reason for Martin's disappearance - ten years after his unexplained departure, she hears from an old friend, Molly, that Martin may be in Ireland. She travels over there, and although she doesn't find Martin, she finds herself - she gets her life back. The answers she discovers allow her to bring closure to the relationship and move on.

Redhill explores themes of lies and deception when he takes us back to Martin's childhood and his parents' marriage. That relationship, in itself, is very interesting. Redhill probes how differences in religion and background will eventually fracture a marriage with tragic consequences for children. He looks at how parents' withdrawal - both physical and emotional - have different impacts on different people. Jolene and Martin handle similar situations differently. Two lines succinctly illustrate this - Martin's "gotta go" and Jolene's "stay with me."

This is a wonderful book. In order to get full appreciation, I recommend that it be read at least twice. Read it first to find out what happens, and then again to appreciate Redhill's craft.

Jolene Iolas, a young college student in upstate New York, encounters Martin Sloane's nostalgic box art (similar to Joseph Cornell's) while visiting a Toronto gallery. She begins a correspondence with the artist, older by thirty years, and invites him to exhibit at her college. The two eventually become lovers, although Martin is reluctant ever to leave his Toronto home and studio for more than a few days. Then without warning, in the middle of the night, he vanishes. Jolene is devastated. She moves to Toronto to try to find out what happened. Ten years pass, and just as she has found a new lover and almost learned to stop caring, her estranged college roommate, Molly, reconnects with her to report that there is an artist in Ireland exhibiting under Martin's name ... It's rare to find a literary novel that's also such a wonderful page-turner, but to characterize this as a mystery or a thriller would be to sell it well short. Redhill's debut is a beautifully crafted and astonishingly controlled meditation on love, loss, memory, the need to have a home, the need to contain life without being contained by it and, importantly, "the full and perfect speechlessness of things" - the way we give objects the task of bearing memory, of carrying our emotion and experience in surrogate. The mystery of what drives Martin's creativity is linked to the mysteries of why he vanished and why his work is appearing in Ireland again now. The ultimate solution is like the climax of a Greek tragedy: inevitable without for one moment being foreseeable, and it has the same kind of heartbreaking power. Technically, too, this is a wonderful novel. Redhill chooses his scenes wisely (the prelude is superbly deployed). He slips convincingly into both male and female perspectives; shifts seamlessly between continents and times. And unlike so many poets who turn to fiction, his prose is not overburdened by self-consciously elaborate construction nor by a too-musical ear. Rather, he brings to his prose the poet's gift of precision. It's remarkable how much he can evoke with so little, even with a single phrase. Strongly recommended.

Accolades for a book of the quality of MARTIN SLOANE cannot match the intrinsic gleam of this mutifacteted jewel of creation. Michael Redhill apparently spent 10 years from the time of first release of this novel in Canada revising, polishing, perfecting this extended poem-like novel and the energy he spent is apparent only in the fact that the end result is as close to perfection as a first novel can get. This does not feel like a "over-worked, struggling idea" that some might expect of a novel revised a dozen times. We are only aware of a lustrous story beautifully rendered.

MARTIN SLOANE is basically the story of a man who quietly tries to discover the events of his childhood by creating collage boxes - three dimensional constructions of art in the manner of Joseph Cornell. A recluse, he is "discovered" by a Bard College freshman by the name of Jolene Iolas who invites him to exhibit the works she cannot purchase in the gallery of her college, an event that leads to a ten year relationship between the 54 year old Martin and the 19 year old Jolene. Living in two cities they carry on a strange existence at once supportive and threatening. When Martin suddenly, by night, walks away into obscurity, Jolene mourns his absence, then proceeds with her life in temporary zones, until she finally traces Martin's 'lost childhood' to his origins in Ireland. This is a greatly oversimplified synopsis, excluding many twists and turns and characters, but that is basically our story.

The beauty of this book is in the writing, the poetic use of language, the sensitive interplay of flashbacks that at times take some work on the part of the reader to determine which voice is narrating. This is a paean to the universal feelng of loss of person when age reminds us that our childhood can never be retrieved, much less be completely and wholly known or understood. Had we the ability to enter our child's space, get to know the 'me' hidden there, we might be more adept at coping with love and relationships. The dance of memory with make-believe, reality with imagination, child truth with adult fiction - all these components make this story far more than simply the enormously well-told novel that it is. This book is a work of great beauty and a gift to the fortunate reader who happens upon it. A gleamingly fine novel.

Martin Sloane is a spare, evocative little novel about love and loss. It's authoritatively written and conjures a pleasant low-key melancholy. It reads quickly.

It is not, however, particularly memorable. Which is puzzling -- the story begins powerfully and narrator Jolene and her best friend Molly fascinate throughout.

The trouble seems to lie with the title character, who is perhaps even more a cypher than author Redhill intended. Yes, the crux of the tale revolves around Jolene's, and our, inability to truly know Sloane. Yet as a character in a fiction he seems so tenuously drawn, despite lengthy, structurally awkward flashbacks to his childhood, that one must take Jolene & Molly's interest in him on faith.

Moreover, Sloane is clearly based upon artist Joseph Cornell and his mysterious, magical boxes. Aside from dry catalog listings opening each section, Sloane's boxes are barely described. To choose a subject as distinct as Cornell's luminous work and then barely utilize it feels like a cheat. Perhaps unfairly, I spent much of the book wondering what a writer like Steven Millhauser would do with such an opportunity.

This is a nicely written little book, but there's some crucial element missing from it.

Plot of the story is simply wacked. Boyfriend leaves you and you hunt him down some 10 years later. Nuff said.