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. The stories spill from Hosseini’s bountiful imagination, but they compete against each other, denying the novel a catalyst the result is a bloated, unwieldy work.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. And identity? Hosseini struggles to convince us that Pari becomes a well-integrated Frenchwoman. It’s true that betrayal is a constant theme, as it was in The Kite Runner, but it doesn’t work as a glue.
Missing is the viselike tension of the earlier novels. There follow the stories of mother and daughter in Paris, Markos’ childhood in Greece (an irrelevance), the return to Kabul of expat cousins from California and the Afghan warlord who stole the old village. Nabi confesses his guilt in facilitating the sale of Pari and describes the adoptive couple: his boss Suleiman, a gay man secretly in love with him, and his wife, Nila, a half-French poet who high-tails it to France with Pari after Suleiman has a stroke. Nabi’s own story comes next in a posthumous tell-all letter (creaky device) to Markos, the Greek plastic surgeon who occupies the Kabul house from 2002 onwards. The drama does nothing to prepare us for the coming leaps in time and place. Saboor’s brother-in-law Nabi is a cook/chauffeur for a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul he helps arrange the sale of Pari to the couple, breaking Abdullah’s heart.
His first wife died giving birth to their daughter Pari, who’s now 4 and has been raised lovingly by her brother, 10-year-old Abdullah two peas in a pod, but “leftovers” in the eyes of Parwana, Saboor’s second wife. Saboor is a dirt-poor day laborer in a village two days walk from Kabul. After two stellar novels set (mostly) in Kabul, Afghanistan, Hosseini’s third tacks among Afghanistan, California, France and Greece to explore the effect of the Afghan diaspora on identity.
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