Edward Said once described exile as 'the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: Its essential sadness can never be surmounted.' However true that may be, it applies far more to the struggling Haitians, who are beaten and robbed for being 'Africanos,' than to the novel’s less-than-humble narrator. MacKenzie recognizes that Emma’s self-imposed exile creates a different kind of rift entirely, a 'privileged kind of displacement' that could easily be repaired with an airline ticket. ... MacKenzie makes clear what Emma might not always see: that her life stands in stark contrast to those of both newly arrived Haitians and impoverished Brazilians. Expatriate novels often reveal far more about their characters’ homelands than they do about their presumably exotic destinations. Feast Days does likewise.
Feast Days is a book about the haves and have-nots told from the point of view of the haves. For all their differences, the expats share an important bond with their Brazilian hosts: the common language of capital gains and wine lists. Yet for all their luxuries, Emma and her husband lack one vital status symbol: a child to dote on ... Using thin brushstrokes, inventive turns of phrase, and fragmentary, dialogue-heavy sections, he deftly captures how an outsider is only able to comprehend a country in pieces, assembling an incomplete puzzle over time. What holds this portrait of a marriage together, across time and across continents, is Emma’s voice. Wry and melancholy, she is a sensitive weather vane to the changing winds in her own relationships, and to the storm brewing in a country that she wants desperately to make sense of, if only to understand how she ended up in Brazil in the first place. MacKenzie’s slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight, dramatizing what it’s like for the wealthy to live with the poor in the corner of their eye.
MacKenzie's narrative could better be described as complex vignettes, forming pieces of conversations and events that are oftentimes non-sequential, which can sometimes be confusing and difficult to follow. However, MacKenzie makes up for it with a main character that evokes not only empathy but also a good deal of curiosity. Emma is not a whiner or a weakling; she attempts to make Sao Paulo home in the best way she knows how, by merging with its inhabitants and trying to understand it from within ... Feast Days poses the dilemma of being a stranger not solely in a strange land, but also inside our own lives.
This is an expansive book tangling big ideas on class and race, marriage and politics. Emma narrates her life in fragments, flipping between expensive restaurants and political marches. MacKenzie has found a narrator who can voice many of the uncomfortable issues of our time: one cannot help but read on. He is exploring the privilege of the white American abroad, and Feast Days delivers cutting criticism ... For the most part, this book rings devastatingly true. Occasionally, however, there is a coldness to the language, an emotional distancing that leaves the reader unable to really care for the characters. There is also a delight in words that is wonderful to read, a delicious speed to the prose. Feast Days is not a thriller, but reads a little like one, moving swiftly from one kind of experience to the next with brutal, dazzling effect.
The challenge of a novel like this is to avoid creating a protagonist confined to self-loathing and self-involvement, as can sometimes be the case in Paul Bowles and Graham Greene, while at the same time plotting an engaging story that exposes the stakes and consequences of her implication in the world around her. MacKenzie does especially well in this regard by endowing Emma with a gift for cool and scouring observation. Unfortunately—and this happens more than enough in the novel—Emma offers a little too much grad-student smart analysis of this evocation herself, which saps some of the potency. Equally enervating is her need to ensure we know she reads all the right writers and knows of the relevant high-end literary connections between the Anglosphere and Brazil ... This book, like any other, has a beginning, middle, and end. But unlike most—and this is MacKenzie’s subtly bold gambit — this novel never really offers any crisis or culminating event or revelation or heroic accomplishment set up along that natural narrative line. Instead, Feast Days offers a series of non-climactic episodes and vignettes and flashbacks, all sporting clever and ironic titles, that trace out Emma in her circulations through the crammed-together, antipodal world of the decadent couple day trips, dismal refugee shelters, posh children’s birthday parties and tear-gas-filled street riots ... it leaves you, fittingly, with cool irony.
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.
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 ... An emotionally chilly novel that never delves deeply or complexly enough into any of its individual characters or the country of Brazil.
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 ... 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.
