Time's a Thief

April 10, 2006
By age 11, Cornwell had a well-deserved reputation as "an academic reject and troublemaker." Besides running with young thugs in London's East End, he had attacked a nun, a teacher at his school. But after a stranger molested him, he became a devout altar boy and, two years later, a priest-in-training at Cotton College. There he lost his Cockney accent, felt schoolboy crushes and constantly wrestled with an overzealous conscience, his scruples exacerbated by priest-teachers ranging from rigid to predatory. Helping him navigate stormy adolescence was the brilliant and sensible Father Armishaw, literature teacher and music lover, who cared for him as his own troubled father and volatile mother were never able to do. Readers who objected to Cornwell's controversial bestseller Hitler's Pope
may not appreciate his portrayal of Catholics in the 1950s, and the memoir police may accuse him of erring on the side of invention, especially since he kept no diaries. Despite its occasional touch of narcissism—his culminating struggle is with "the embodiment of all those in my life who had failed to see my worth"—the book is a fine read. With a literary novelist's eye for detail and ear for dialogue, Cornwell has written a psychologically astute and often touching coming-of-age story.

February 1, 2017
In 1980s New York, a naive young intellectual is entranced, employed, exasperated, and expelled by members of a wealthy family.Firmani's debut tells the story of Francesca "Chess" Varani from her first year at Barnard until "the day when youth finally died" two decades later, when she learns what became of a wealthy college friend named Kendra Marr-Lowenstein, whose writer mother she worked for as a personal assistant, whose musician brother she fell in love with, whose whole exotic, damaged family bewitched her then betrayed her utterly. Like last year's Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler, it is the coming-of-age of a young woman under the influence of unwholesome Manhattan sophisticates; like the previous year's City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, it is a nostalgic paean to the city's recent past, studded with continual highbrow references. One character's personality is summed up by the fact that she reads Jurgen Habermas in the original German, another leaves a conversation about Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism to puke in an umbrella stand, and everything Chess sets eyes on recalls one artist or another. Despite her generous hand with her encyclopedic knowledge of everything, Chess is an engaging character, often very funny and cool. From working-class Italian origins in a burg she calls Barfonia, she details her enchantment by the Marr-Lowensteins from the night she meets Kendra standing in the street at 4 a.m. with blue hair, a clutch purse sagging with dexies, and the air of "deposed royalty." She asks Chess for a light. "Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand," Chess tells the reader. The Marr-Lowensteins, Salinger-esque in some ways (the one Chess falls for is named Jerry), are the novel's biggest problem. Unremittingly described in the most extreme, overheated terms, not one of them ever seems like a real person, and they don't act like real people either, disappearing without a trace for years at a time, reappearing in places they can't possibly know Chess will be, both more awful and more magical than they need to be to engage our emotions. When all is said and done, one's love/hate relationship with this book leans to the side of love.

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March 15, 2017
Kendra Lowenstein is somewhat legendary for her absence on the Barnard campus, which is why Francesca Chess Varani is so surprised to meet her on a random street corner in New York. Immediately fascinated by an eccentricity so affected that it's unaffected, Chess starts spending time at the Lowensteins' 11th Street mansion, much to the chagrin of her punk-rock student friends. Firmani really captures the grit and promise of 1980s New York, with too many cigarettes and dingy punk shows, when it was both unusual and magical for kids to come from rural Pennsylvania (as Chess did) for school. Chess is like The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway, the straight vessel for the eccentricities of her new, rich friendsKendra, her heartbreaking brother, her infamous motherand their genteel mental illness straight out of a Salinger novel. And yet, as she orbits the cruelty and fabulosity of the Lowensteins, the novel is her coming-of-age story, one that continues well into her thirties and traverses everything from an intense love affair to dubious employment. A leisurely exploration of character and place that, when you connect to Chess, packs a wallop.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2016

Smart but insecure, working-class Barnard student Francesca "Chess" Varani is entranced by supremely self-involved classmate Kendra, then takes a postgraduate job with chic intellectual Clarice Marr--all related from the forlorn perspective of the 2008 financial downturn. Firmani has published in such venues as the Kenyon Review; propulsive prose.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2017

In the late 1980s, Barnard student Francesca (Chess) Varani is a budding intellectual and punk rocker dazzled by New York City, her own heady sense of independence, and her deliverance from a destitute, unhappy family in a dull, depressing hometown. When she bumps into fellow student Kendra Marr-Lowenstein outside the subway station one night, Chess is drawn in by the other girl's old-world glamour and oddball charisma. Thus begins her obsession and long-term love/hate relationship with the well-heeled, dysfunctional Marr-Lowenstein family, which includes the malevolent, imperious matriarch Clarice Marr, a renowned feminist writer who hires Chess as a live-in personal assistant after college; and Kendra's drug-addicted brother Jerry, a fragile genius with whom Chess falls deeply in love. A wistful Chess, still an aspiring writer working in a soul-crushing temp job, recounts the story in 2008, with the wisdom of an additional 20 years of life experience, in a post-9/11 New York hit by the Great Recession. VERDICT Firmani's debut novel is a nostalgic paean to 1980s New York and a compelling story of youthful infatuation, love, and disillusionment. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.