Agnes Mallory

by Andrew Klavan

When Harry begins to receive tormented letters from his childhood friend Agnes, a struggling sculptress, it reawakens his past. Harry begins to seek out Agnes, believing he can help her. After all he was the only one closest to understanding the mysterious source of her art. Ten years after her death, faced with a young, soulful girl reminiscent of Agnes, Harry feels trapped, threatened and chastened. Agnes' story encompasses his own youth, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the breadth of the American dream.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Reference for now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_K...

Reviews

[Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read many Andrew Klavan novels and loved every one of them. I will eventually finish them all because I like his writing that much. Agnes Mallory is not in his usual mystery/suspense genre. Rather it is part coming of age-part love story, but most of all a human drama that I will not soon forget. I have to believe that there is much that is autobiographical in this novel, because no one could be so truthful and write with such feeling without having experienced it. Highly recommended.

[RANGER · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part coming of age, part coming to grips with the past, part searching for a plot novel
I purchased "Agnes Mallory" after reading a brief article about Andrew Klavan as the Edgar Award winning author of mystery, suspense and adventure novels. I didn't realize that Klavan also had a sort of murky literary phase in his early novels in which he was coming to grips with both a mental illness and a serious existential crisis about the reality of the Holocaust, his parents' secular Judaism, and Western Civilization.
Let me begin by stating what the story is about. Harry and Agnes are close childhood friends with a childish affection for each other. They are secular Jews in 1950s America. Agnes' elderly father, too old for her mother, is a Holocaust survivor who has never gotten over the murder of his first daughter by the NAZIs. Agnes is bearing the existential weight of this and is obsessed with all kinds of metaphysical weirdness. Due to a conflict related to the fact that Harry's father had a brief affair with Agnes' mother, Agnes' family moves away and they become separated by life events. Keep in mind, this separation takes place when they are 8 years old --an age most of us barely remember.
In the course of life, Harry becomes a corrupt, politically connected lawyer with a wife and family. Agnes becomes a semi-famous wood sculptor. The entire story reads like a secular Jew's coming of age memoir. You feel like Harry is channeling Andrew Klavan's own secular Jewish upbringing in 1950s-60s Long Island. As Harry's life unravels he begins corresponding with Agnes who is married to a Gentile musician and living in Vermont. Bottom Line: The two reconnect after Harry has to run away from the law and the result is not so good for either of them. The book is told as a recollection, several years after Agnes' death, requested by Agnes' adult daughter, Lena, who is searching for the truth about her mother's life and has tracked Harry down to wherever it is he has ended up after the collapse of his middle-class life.
It's a well written, literary style novel and does resemble a coming of age memoir informed by the real life coming of age of Andrew Klavan. But the ending of the book, the ending of the story of Harry and Agnes after their reconnection, the entire dialogue with Lena -- all feels fragmented and incomplete.
I also feel this novel lacked much in the way of suspense although there were several opportunities to darken the material that Klavan never seemed to exploit. It feels unfinished to me. True, the revelation of Agnes' secret project and the whole issue of coming to grips with the Holocaust is in there but it feels forced. Only Klavan's excellent descriptive prose kept me going as I kept looking for a more sinister, disturbing, exciting or thrilling ending instead of what was delivered.
I did follow this up with Klavan's excellent auto-biography, "The Great Good Thing." And I did discover many autobiographical elements did make it into "Agnes Mallory." But I still don't feel strongly enough about this novel to recommend it. Unless you are a major Klavan fan. But his later, better stuff is very different, so I am told.

[Mike Flinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered Agnes Mallory through Andrew Klavan’s memoir, A Great Good Thing. Reading that memoir gave me a deeper understanding of the symbolism and themes woven into this novel—themes I may not have fully appreciated had I not read the memoir first.

This isn’t the typical page-turner or conventional mystery you might expect from an Edgar Award winner. Instead, Agnes Mallory is a slow, somber unraveling. What ultimately sets it apart is its haunting meditation on the limits of art in the face of true evil.

Klavan suggests that some horrors—like the Holocaust—are so vast and so unspeakable that they defy representation. Art, no matter how beautiful, cannot contain them. The only honest response is destruction: to burn the art, to let it vanish, just as the millions who died in the Holocaust were erased. In that void, the absence itself becomes the truest memorial—a silence more chilling than any image or word could ever hope to capture.

[Gabby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I noticed that only one person who marked this book as read and rated it gave an opinion on it, and even that one comment was brief and vague. From the time I was about half way through the book, I began to wonder what in the world I was going to say about it. It's not a terrible book, but it isn't very good either. If all the rambling thoughts leading nowhere were removed from the body of work, there would be very little left to read. The book may be called Agnes Mallory, but the story is really about Harry Bernard and the relationship he developed with Agnes when they were children. It seems as though he is drawn to Agnes because she's strange, although what she is as a child in no way prepares either Harry or the reader for what she becomes as an adult. Agnes' father is a Holocaust survivor, and during her childhood Agnes takes on the responsibility of trying to make her father less remote by distracting him from living with past memories of a daughter he lost during a Nazi attack on his village. This could have been a very emotional story had Klaven only stayed with a plot and expanded on it following Agnes and Harry through to adulthood. Instead it's more of an exercise in vocabulary showmanship (some words were not listed in my Kindle Dictionaries at all) and an attempt to find something profound to say about the most trivial objects, scenery, or events. I've read other novels by Andrew Klaven, and for me they were riveting. I was disappointed with Agnes Mallory mainly because when I finally finished it, I couldn't begin to explain the point of it. Because of that, I wouldn't know to whom I could recommend this book. I have another book by Andrew Klaven in my TBR pile. I hope it's better than this one.

[Melissa (So Behind) · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars
This is an all right book, but nothing particularly memorable. I want my mysteries to be a bit more mysterious or my characters more compelling. This had neither.

I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book.

[Zakkary Mcnutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of his better books

[Janell Barney · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book kept drawing me in for some reason. It is one that will stay with me for awhile. If I could give half stars I would give it a 3 1/2 star rating but I can't so I will settle for 3.

[Sanaa Khalil]

Agnes Mallory