Ostensibly, Simons's first novel is a coming-of-age story intertwining the lives of three Kansas friends during the 1970s and 1980s. The story focuses on Tully (a nickname for Natalie), a young woman who has endured a childhood of abuse and abandonment to become a promiscuous teenager who longs to move to California. When wealthy Robin DeMarco promises her both love and financial security, Tully marries him and proceeds to live a life tormented by her friend's suicide, childhood traumas, and affairs. It is difficult for the listener to imagine what the men see in Tully, for she is deceitful and manipulative, with seemingly no conscience. Also, the plot is melodramatic and more reminiscent of a soap opera than a serious novel. Actress Karen Allen's raspy voice does nothing to enhance this flat and depressing story. Not recommended.-Susan McCaffrey, Legg Middle Sch. Lib., Coldwater, Mich.
The publishing industry has cranked into high gear to promote this hefty first novel about heartache and craziness on the Great Plains. What, we wonder, is all the fuss about? Would you believe a feisty, troubled, graceful, and gray-eyed gal named Tully? Simons, Russian-born and American-raised, has set her melodramatic, slow-as-molasses, seventies novel in Topeka, Kansas, a location emblematic both of what is most trying and most meaningful in life. It is a place of meteorological extremes and a subtle beauty that either grows on you or drives you mad. Tully is the same way: extreme, unconventionally attractive, and simply maddening. Raped by an uncle and beaten and abused by her mentally ill mother, Tully barely survives her wretched adolescence. Just when she seems to be healing, her best friend commits suicide, and Tully is hurled back into the abyss. Such physical and emotional battery is bound to make love a tricky endeavor, and Tully makes quite a mess of it, tormenting the kind and generous men who finally earn her trust. There's rock-steady Robin, poetic Jeremy, and Jack the sun god. Our girl Tully manages to devastate each in her own monumentally self-absorbed way, but to Simons' credit, Tully's behavior is wholly comprehensible and oddly forgivable. Paced as sluggishly as a TV soap, it will be hailed as a provocative entertainment and condemned as a particularly viscous form of quicksand. Either way, "Tully" is a wallow, and sometimes, doggone it, that's just what the doctor orders.
"What a lovely and resonant evocation of that first great bond between women— it's deeply moving."—Anne Rivers Siddons
"A big, ambitious book whose characters stick in the reader's mind."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Reads fast, like a sudden surge of wind over the plains, and the book's momentum builds to tornado force."—USA Today
David Sedaris's deadpan delivery is the perfect foil to the bizarre in his latest collection of essays, and it's hard to imagine another reader recounting these unlikely anecdotes. Most of the readings were recorded in a Paris studio, although some live performances are interspersed, complete with an appreciative live audience. But their easy responses, sometimes as automatic as a television sitcom's laugh track, are often more distracting than encouraging. Listeners accustomed to Sedaris's stories on Public Radio International's "This American Life" will find these readings, about his family, his early adult life, living in France and attempting to learn the language, a little less exuberant, a little more thoughtful, suffering only, perhaps, from the absence of producer Ira Glass's masterful editorial hand. The tone does seem fitting, though, for the essays slide in and out of fleeting sadness, even as they mock and self-deprecate and aim for irony. Sedaris is at his worst when glib, and his least successful essays are those that rant against modern life: New York restaurants, computers. He is at his best when he's describing the absurdity of childhood, moments so unexpectedly strange and yet recognizable, like Sedaris's boyhood dream of performing a one-man show as Billie Holiday singing commercial jingles (and he provides pitch-perfect renditions), that they prompt gleeful, giddy laughter. J.M.D.
