From Publishers Weekly
The dry wit and clever plotting that distinguished Clark's debut,
The Hills at Home, are applied with a heavy hand in this new comedy of manners, whose three parts fail to mesh. In 1992, Alden Lowe, his wife, Becky, and their teenage daughter, Julie, take up residence in an ancient castle in Prague. Alden is in charge of the finance ministry, while Becky attempts to launch fledgling entrepreneurs. The tone is high farce, as we watch Alden being ineffectual; Becky moping after an erstwhile lover, William; Julie seeking to bed her father's aide; and everybody else vying to become capitalists. By the time Becky decamps to join William in Khadafy's Libya, the reader has little empathy for any of the self-absorbed characters who have been blundering around Prague. The narrative takes hold, however, in a flashback to the lovers' triangle two decades earlier, before Becky married Alden. This is the heart of the novel, and it's tender, funny and touching, especially since Alden's grandparents are the eccentric WASP Hills readers met in the first book. But the final third of the novel, with Becky and William dreamily ensconced in an ancient villa is flat, notable mainly for its local color and political references. Clark's talent for satire shines only at intervals.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
It's 1992, and the Czechs are waking up to consumer culture. Alden and Becky Lowe, whom we first met in Clark's
Hills at Home (2002), move with their teenage daughter to Prague, Alden to work at the Ministry of Finance and Becky to give support to women launching their own businesses. At work and at home (a decrepit castle), they are surrounded by a richly comic cast of characters emerging from "beneath the thumb of a shabby little regime." But just as the reader is settling in for a long, tart comedy of manners, Becky drives off to join William, the man she has loved for years, who now occupies an old Roman villa in Libya. There are really two books here, one a razor-sharp take on capitalism and marriage and the other a meandering stroll through Becky and William's affair. Clark's wit, her sense of place, and her affectionately drawn characters make for a novel that is highly rewarding in parts, if not as a whole.
Mary Ellen QuinnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
