Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. 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. Soap-operatic in spots, but a fine adult love story with locations both exotic and familiar.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.
Will true love win out? Can things be fixed and contempt disarmed? All that remains to be seen, but for the moment, think of Adichie’s elegantly written, emotionally believable novel as a kind of update of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. The years pass, and Ifemelu is involved in the usual entanglements, making a reunion with Obinze all the more complicated. The years pass, and the world changes: In the America where Ifemelu is increasingly at home, “postracial” is a fond hope, but everyone seems just a little bewildered at how to get there, and meanwhile, Ifemelu has to leave the safe, sheltered confines of Princeton to go to Trenton if she’s to get her hair done properly.
It is a place and a society where, as a vivacious “aunty” remarks, “he problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass.” Ifemelu’s high school sweetheart, Obinze, is too proud for any of that smart and scholarly, he has been denied a visa to enter post-9/11 America (says his mother, “he Americans are now averse to foreign young men”), and now he is living illegally in London, delivering refrigerators and looking for a way to find his beloved.
Ifemelu, beautiful and naturally aristocratic, has the good fortune to escape Nigeria during a time of military dictatorship.
A sensitive portrayal of distant love, broken affinities and culture clash by Nigerian novelist Adichie ( Purple Hibiscus, 2003, etc.).Ībsence makes the heart grow fonder, it’s said-but as often it makes the heart grow forgetful.
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