Lisa Gornick, as a writer and a psychoanalyst, beautifully reveals the natures of a host of characters: rich and poor, drunken and abstemious, impulsive and cautious, artistic and crass, and those who are noble though not of nobility and those of (mostly American) nobility who are far from noble. She gives us a four-generational tale that begins and ends with hope ... A great novel, which this surely is, transports us through time, place and into the souls of its characters ... You will be deeply moved. You may cry at the end of this novel. Gornick has given her readers a tale suffused with pathos and moral imperative, which tugs kindly and powerfully at our hearts.
...[a] wonderfully complex, many-stranded novel ... Gornick weaves it all into the fictional fabric with exceptional cunning ... A nimble exercise in interlaced stories and psychological insight, The Peacock Feast is marvelously rich in character, event and locale ... Along the way, the several story lines address the balance of chance and fate, opportunity taken and opportunity denied, the cost of buried memory and the centrality of loss. The result is a thoroughly rewarding novel and, though not terribly long, a truly mighty one.
It’s not altogether clear what to make of this kind of revisionism. What are the ethics of leveling shocking fictionalized allegations against real historical figures? Is the accusation something Ms. Gornick unearthed in her research (she lists her sources at the end of the book) or is it pure invention? The fact that the reader cannot tell seems like a violation of the historical novelist’s contract with the past. The novel is on firmer ground when it relates the lives of women who have tended to go overlooked by biographers ... The Peacock Feast dwells on suffering and trauma but it’s at its best in the key of celebration.
Sprawling and nostalgic in both prose and construction, The Peacock Feast serves up characters who suffer dire consequences from poor decisions as well as happenstance ... The Peacock Feast doesn’t have the contemporary, fast-paced sense of so many historical novels today, instead embracing an old-fashioned feel. It’s more 'tea in the drawing room' than #wineandbooks on Instagram, with ambling sentences meant to be read and not binged, and a sense of literary leisure at times evocative of the Gilded Age that anchors it.
Spanning a century, two coasts, and two continents, this well-researched historical novel is moving and profound, laying bare the corrosive nature of secrets and regrets and the sadness of not living one's life to the fullest.
Synthesizing[,] sensitive and soapy ... The deftness of Gornick’s talent is visible in the hints and glimpses of the past that puncture the rather more rote accounts of the passing generations. The family secret, when finally revealed, is less a surprise than a confirmation of what has been suggested and tidily connects the foundational dots ...Finely observed and ultimately redemptive, but the gloom and reticence are overwhelming in this old-fashioned, rather too visibly predetermined family drama.
