Feast Days

Starred review from November 20, 2017
No one could accuse the heroine of MacKenzie’s second novel (after City of Strangers) of leading an unexamined life, and the wit with which she conducts that examination elevates this brilliant work. Emma—her name evokes Flaubert’s restless housewife—is a “trailing spouse” accompanying her investment banker husband to São Paulo, “a city that reminded you of what Americans used to think the future would look like—gleaming and decrepit at once.” Possessing a degree in cultural anthropology and dead languages, she interrogates her position in this unfamiliar, stratified society: “There were aspects of the world that, because of my husband, I had the luxury of not paying attention to.” Emma gives English lessons, lunches with affluent wives, flirts with adultery, and muses on time as a “confusion of folds,” seeing Brazil, her marriage, and language as palimpsests bearing signs of the past, the present, and the future. Her observations are satirical, incisive, and often melancholy. As street protests calling for political change intensify, so too do Emma’s anxiousness and aimless desires, beset as she is by an “affliction of vagueness.” There is no cataclysm but rather a pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, conveyed in MacKenzie’s unruffled, discerning prose. With it, MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

January 1, 2018
In MacKenzie's second novel (City of Strangers, 2009), an American woman living temporarily in Sao Paulo with her banker husband witnesses Brazil's increasing political and economic unrest while experiencing personal unrest of her own.When the novel opens in the relatively recent post-Great Recession era, almost 30-year-old Emma (whose name is withheld from readers for no apparent reason until almost the end of the novel) has been living in Sao Paulo for six months and considers herself an expat. She narrates her adventures in short snippets of observation, conversation, and memory while showing off her flare for etymology, her one true interest, whenever possible. The relatively brief novel recounts endless rounds of lunches with a group Emma thinks of as "the Wives," chic dinners with her never-named husband, posh parties with his business associates, and hours spent looking out the windows of her apartment in a fortresslike high-rise. Married for five years and without professional ambitions of her own, she has no work to occupy her except tutoring a handful of rich Brazilians--the couple associates only with rich Brazilians--who want to practice their English. But Emma is aware of constant turmoil in the country. One night, leaving a restaurant, she and her husband are held at knife point and robbed by three young boys. Neither Emma nor her husband is hurt, but the robbery haunts her. She visits a poor neighborhood and imagines how hard the lives of her robbers must be. Soon she is volunteering at a refugee center run in a Catholic church while continuing her posh social life. She witnesses growing unrest within the population with a sympathy her husband does not share. The couple argues with increasing intensity over having a baby--he wants children; she resists. Meanwhile she carries on a low-wattage flirtation with her husband's co-worker Marcos, whose wife, Iara, is her caring friend. An emotionally chilly novel that never delves deeply or complexly enough into any of its individual characters or the country of Brazil.

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February 1, 2018
Emma and her husband are walking along the street after dining at an expensive restaurant in Sao Paulo when they are mugged at knifepoint. For a moment, the worlds of the well-off American couple and some impoverished street kids collide, before they careen back to their separate orbits. As Emma finds in her new life in Brazil, the seemingly distant world of poverty is never far off in this land of plenty for a few and hardly anything for most. Overeducated and underemployed, Emma whiles away her days with ladies' lunches and some English tutoring, while her investment-banker husband works at a job that baffles her. Her isolation is palpable in the snapshots she relates in this poignant and perceptive novel. Emma must navigate the complexities of living in a country she does not completely understand even while her marriage is undergoing cataclysmic shifts that could very well send it tumbling down. Her resilience and reflection during this crucible moment in her life offer a satisfyingly complex look at the challenges of life abroad.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)