Review by New York Times Review
Placing A young child at the center of a narrative is a tricky move. Children are, well, childish, full of faulty observations and unreliable conclusions. And then there's the practical matter of motoring a plot along when - as in Victor Lodato's new novel, "Edgar and Lucy" - the child in question is an 8-year-old loner who can't remember important phone numbers or, because he has albinism, even go outside without pharmaceutical-grade sunscreen. A novel requires some kind of trouble, and watching a child navigate peril is harder on the heart than observing adult woes. It can feel facile, this ostensible shortcut to empathy, and requires a certain authority to prevent the whole enterprise from tipping into implausibility or soppy sentimentality. But this is familiar territory for Lodato, who is also a playwright and a poet. His captivating debut novel, "Mathilda Savitch," featured the 13-year-old heroine of the title as its fierce, brokenhearted narrator. In "Edgar and Lucy," he switches things up a bit. Grief is still the heart of the matter here, but Lodato is working in a broader register that includes other, mostly adult, points of view. Still, he repeats the impressive trick of creating a character so peculiar, vivid and appealing (think of Owen Meany minus the messianic complex) that Edgar becomes this ambitious novel's enduring reward. "Having a life meant having a story," the book begins. "Even at 8, Edgar knew this." Weighing on the diminutive Edgar is what he doesn't know about his life. He knows - "but only vaguely, a borrowed memory" - that his father, Frank, died on a bridge. He knows that his mother, Lucy, has "a telltale limp for which Edgar knew no tale." (That echo of "a telltale heart" is surely intentional: In one of this novel's many well-deployed literary allusions, Edgar's middle name is Allan.) He is painfully aware that his appearance sets him apart, the preternaturally pale skin, shock of white hair, green eyes and "wrists so thin the bones rose like the lurky eyes of an alligator. In movement he was awkward; in stillness he possessed a natural grace, remarkable van Eyck hands, a long neck worthy of Pontormo. But in the mirror all the boy saw was an insect." On every page, Lodato's prose sings with a robust, openhearted wit, making "Edgar and Lucy" a delight to read. The book's title, a possible nod to Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," is a bit of a warning shot that we are in for a tale of operatic shape, littered with madness, mistaken identity, betrayal, ghosts. (When Lucy's suitor, a well-meaning butcher, tries to teach Edgar how to cut a tomato with an oversized knife, you can be sure it's not going to go as planned.) Edgar and Lucy live in New Jersey with Frank's mother, Florence, also a widow. "Widows!" Edgar thinks. "They were almost like witches, weren't they? They were deathy. They had secrets." Lucy and Florence are, in fact, secretive, and their parenting alliance - forged in the wake of Frank's mental deterioration and suicide - is rickety. Lucy, to put it kindly, is a hands-off kind of mom - hairdresser by day, drinker and world-class flirt by night. She loves Edgar, but treats him more like a curious roommate than a son and has willingly ceded his parenting to her mother-in-law. Florence, recognizable to anyone from an Italian-American Catholic family (as I am), is a rosary-wielding maternal beast: consummate worrier, maven of meatballs, self-appointed guardian angel. Edgar is her world and she is his: "Unlike his mother, whose light flashed on him only intermittently, like the beam of a lighthouse, the old woman was nothing less than the sun." One of the many things Lodato renders trenchantly in these pages is how a child in a disrupted home becomes the reluctant vessel of conflict. Edgar is acutely connected to the inner turmoil of both women, and acutely afflicted in his loyalties. "To be alone with either of them was sweetness itself. But combine them and things tightened, a constriction Edgar felt in his sensitive, divining throat." The book is divided into seven movements, but it reads more like two distinct worlds cleaved by Florence's death. (If you are worried I'm revealing too much plot here, you are underestimating Lodato - who, believe me, is just getting warmed up. And if you think death can separate Florence and Edgar, you are seriously underestimating Italian grandmothers.) Florence's absence deepens the fissure between Edgar and Lucy and creates a portal for his mother's greatest fear: "Happy children, especially the dreamy ones, were watched and waited for by a ruinous vengefulness that existed below the threshold of the human." Or, in this case, in a pale green truck, idling down the block from Edgar's school. It's here that the book takes a sharp turn into darker territory. The stranger in the truck, Conrad, is another battered soul who imagines Edgar as a possible path to personal salvation, and the remainder of the book would be unbearable if Conrad turned out to be the character we fear. Luckily for Edgar - and for us - Lodato is far too talented a storyteller to settle for a plot ripped from an episode of "Dateline NBC." Addled with grief and believing, both fairly and unfairly, that Lucy is not up to the task of motherhood, Edgar retreats (flees? is lured? all of these are true) to Conrad's cabin deep within the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. The landscape will be familiar to those in the tristate area as beautiful, desolate and haunted. It's an appropriate stage for Edgar to wait out a personal purgatory that can feel, at times, a bit protracted. The many missed opportunities for Edgar and Lucy to forgive and find their way back to each other occasionally hamper the book's narrative drive. But overall, Lodato keeps us in his thrall because his grip on the tiller stays reassuringly firm. Not to mention the supporting cast he's gathered, a group so eclectic and beguiling that many of them could carry an entire novel on their own. much of lodato's work is concerned with the aftermath of profound loss. In his earlier novel, Mathilda Savitch says, "Grief is an island," an observation just as easily applied to childhood: Both are states we don't manage so much as survive. So it ends up feeling exactly right that young Edgar is our guide here. What makes this disquieting exploration of love and mourning bearable is that Lodato works from a place of compassion. Even in the darkest moments, when his characters are being their worst selves, Lodato bathes them in tenderness and understanding. For all of its existential searching, "Edgar and Lucy" ends up being a riveting and exuberant ride, maybe best described by its young protagonist's musings about his nascent life. "He was bound to this world by a chain of wonder," Edgar thinks, "each link an unanswered question that surely only a long life would be able to undo. Always one had to ask: What happens next?" ? A character so peculiar, vivid and appealing that he becomes the book's enduring reward. CYNTHIA D'APRIX SWEENEY is the author of "The Nest."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 26, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Edgar Fini is an unusual eight-year-old, marked by albinism, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and weird predilections. An accident claimed the life of his father while Edgar was a baby, and his doting grandmother and immature mother keep the incident shrouded in mystery. The constant fighting between these two important figures creates a troubled home for Edgar, until his beloved grandmother dies unexpectedly. When his mother, Lucy, seems too busy with booze and a new boyfriend to notice his unbearable grief, a stranger in a truck is suddenly there to offer the solace Edgar craves. As Lodato, author of the highly acclaimed Mathilda Savitch (2009), opens up his characters' pasts, Lucy's absence becomes more sympathetic in light of her own traumatic history and the weight of the illness and death of Edgar's father. The passing of her mother-in-law hits her harder than she anticipates, but it isn't until Edgar goes missing that Lucy truly hits rock bottom. From there, with the help of the new man in her life, maybe she can crawl back up before it's too late. Through numerous changing viewpoints, the truth is gradually revealed, creating suspense and rewarding readers with unexpected parallels and touching connections. Lodato's remarkable novel traces a broken family's spiritual journey toward healing in moving, magical prose. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A 125,000 print run, a national author tour, and a major marketing campaign ensure reader excitement for this rising literary star.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The sprawling second novel by the author of Mathilda Savitch zooms in on its two title characters to the near-exclusion of everything else. Edgar is eight when the novel opens. Albino and borderline autistic, he's having a hard time making it in urban New Jersey, and he finds himself tempted to take the protection offered by a mysterious bearded middle-aged man who is often found patrolling his neighborhood in a pickup truck. Edgar's widowed mother, Lucy, does her best to care for him, but she's still haunted by her dead husband and chafing under the household rule of her stern Italian mother-in-law, with whom she and Edgar live. The novel has the plot of a much briefer book, and, while some readers may revel in its rich description, others will find it self-indulgent. Secondary characters come across as more quirky than credible, and the introduction of the point of view of a ghostly character disrupts the flow of the narrative. Scenes set in the deserted woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens have an eerie power, as do flashbacks to the early years of Lucy's marriage. While the plot is suspenseful enough to keep the pages turning, Lovado blunts the edges of difficult subjects such as suicide and child endangerment, making for an emotionally easier story. 125,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lucy and her son, Edgar, have lived in New Jersey with her mother-in-law since her husband killed himself. Lucy is not a responsible mother, but Florence takes care of Edgar, a strangely intelligent, hypersensitive eight-year-old. When Florence suddenly dies, things fall apart, and Edgar is rather willingly kidnapped by a mysterious man who has been lurking around the area. He takes Edgar to a remote cabin in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, while a frantic Lucy and the local police launch an inept missing-person investigation. As months go by, Lucy tries to carry on with her life, while Edgar negotiates his way through the strange new place he has arrived at with his kidnapper, who is now acting like a surrogate father and seems to have some mission for Edgar to fulfill. -Verdict Flirting with danger on many fronts, this second novel from the author of the award-winning Mathilda Savitch is perceptive, compassionate, and humorous, drawing readers into the lives of these quirky yet recognizable and sympathetic characters. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/16.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The life of a young albino boy in suburban New Jersey is permanently marked by two tragedies, neither of his making.Playwright and novelist Lodato's debut novel (Mathilda Savitch, 2009) was a sublime coming-of-age story about a young girl. In his ambitious but less focused follow-up, the author switches genders to focus on the life-changing events that shape an 8-year-old boy. It's a dark mirror of Lodato's debut, filled with menace and grief that takes no less than seven weighty passages to play out. The child is Edgar Allan Fini, who has "pale skin, white hair, tired eyes a sea-glass shade of green." To his mother, Lucy, an alcoholic hair stylist, he's "her funny little albino fruitcake." But as Lodato starts building out Lucy and Edgar's world with meticulous detail, he's also lacing the tale with ill intent. First there is the matter of Frank Fini, Edgar's manic-depressive father, who committed suicide by plunging his car off a cliff, nearly taking Lucy with him. There's Edgar's grandmother Florence, who wields such influence over the boy that she continues to muse over his fate even after her death. We have the butcher with whom Lucy is sleeping, who accidentally severs Edgar's finger. Lucy herself is still shattered by Frank's death, to the degree that she tells her lover "please don't be happy" when she finds herself pregnant. It's a dark tale told in stolen moments and silent reflections, and it gets darker as time passes. The final half of the book depicts the strange relationship between Edgar and a man named Conrad who committed a terrible trespass against his own son. These characters hurtle toward a climax that begins to defy plausibilitythe author ties things up with a jarring change in voice at the endbut readers who make it that far are apt to be enraptured already. A domestic fable about grief and redemption likely to leave readers emotionally threadbare. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
