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The Limits: A novel Hardcover – April 9, 2024
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“A big-hearted, tightly-plotted novel that bravely takes on our times by looking at the timeless stuff of human intimacy. The Limits is an immersive and powerful book.”–Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
From Mo’orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia’s imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen’s luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents’ disparate lives—her father’s consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother’s relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock—for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation.
A New York City schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia—and questions her own ability to become a mother—one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna’s love for her nephew, Marcus, is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave.
When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific “paradise,” where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of twenty-first century New York City, The Limits is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateApril 9, 2024
- Dimensions6.46 x 1.26 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-10059344888X
- ISBN-13978-0593448885
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“Deeply moving . . . An astonishingly realistic portrayal of everyday people facing the challenges of modern life.” –Real Simple
“Engaging . . . The Limits is insightful about the ways the Covid crisis applied pressure to unsteady joints, as if testing which bonds would last.” —Wall Street Journal
"In Freudenberger’s worldly, sophisticated storytelling, characters who are essentially good fumble and cause accidents everywhere they go." –Vogue
"Freudenberger ably captures the sense of uncertainty and displacement during the height of the pandemic, matching the inner confusion of major life changes with the outer turmoil of a world in crisis." –The Washington Post
“From New York City to a Zoom screen, from a hospital full of early COVID-19 cases to an island off the coast of Tahiti, Freudenberger brings the anxieties and challenges of the early pandemic days to vivid, engaging life. The characters have full and fascinating inner lives, and real concerns—parenthood, a spreading virus, preserving the natural world—that layer with their interpersonal conflicts . . . In The Limits, Freudenberger deftly employs the questions posed by climate change, seafloor mining and the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown to shape the story.” —BookPage (starred review)
“Freudenberger’s exceptional skills as a novelist, her seamless prose and formidable intelligence, are on full display in The Limits. A novel about privilege and precarity, isolation and trauma, it is also a story of tenderness, love, and ultimately, hope.” –Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
“A big-hearted, tightly-plotted novel that bravely takes on our times—from Covid-19 to climate change—by looking at the timeless stuff of human intimacy. Nell Freudenberger writes beautifully about the bonds between people: parents and children, lovers and exes, even strangers. The Limits is an immersive and powerful book.”–Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind
“Nell Freudenberger proves yet again a masterful novelist, deftly painting her characters' interwoven lives against the backdrop of our tumultuous times. Rich, nuanced and compelling, The Limits is a deeply satisfying novel.”–Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl
“The Limits brilliantly renders the era of the pandemic, capturing how two families, in all their imperfections, try so valiantly to hold on to their loved ones in a difficult time. When you combine Freudenberger's meticulous research with her ability to portray our most complicated selves, the result is a novel that enlightens us in all the ways that truly matter. You will be transformed by this story.” –Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Take My Hand
“The Limits is a transcendently powerful novel, one that will haunt you with its urgent questions. What happens when we reach our own limits: of our capacity to love, or to meet the needs of those who rely on us, or to brook the extraordinary uncertainties of our world? You’ll stay up long past bedtime reading and rereading these exquisitely wrought pages. Freudenberger is a master of the novelist’s art, and this is her best work yet.” –Julie Orringer, author of The Invisible Bridge
“As in Freudenberger's previous work, scientific points are well integrated and explained, and the intelligent, precise narration is a pleasure, with graceful depiction of the characters' inner lives.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A layered story of race and privilege set against the backdrop of Covid-19 lockdowns . . . Freudenberger’s longtime fans will find all the probing social insights and well-drawn characters they’ve come to expect from this accomplished author.” –Publishers Weekly
“Freudenberger is fluent in every realm, social conundrum, and crime against the earth she brings into focus, keenly attuned to science and emotion, tradition and high-tech, race and gender, greed and conscience, irony and tragedy. Each characters’ challenges are significant on scales intimate and global and their wrestling with secrets, anger, and fear grows increasingly suspenseful in this lambent, deeply sympathetic, and thought-provoking novel.” –Booklist (starred review)
"Freudenberger brings the anxieties and challenges of the early pandemic days to vivid, engaging life . . . In The Limits, Freudenberger deftly employs thequestions posed by climate change, seafloormining and the struggle of modern medicinein the face of the unknown to shape the story." –BookPage (starred review)
“Sensitive, luminous, and sometimes wryly funny, The Limits is a nuanced portrait of the difficult, worthwhile work of connecting with others-–even during a global disaster.” –Shelf Awareness
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf (April 9, 2024)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 059344888X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593448885
- Item Weight : 1.32 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.46 x 1.26 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #38,801 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,148 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #1,619 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- #3,334 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novels The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
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I did not realize the extent to which the pandemic was so front and center in the book; that one of the characters was a doctor, treating patients with COVID. This made it a hard read for me because during the height of the pandemic I had trouble reading at all but when I resumed, I tended to avoid anything about it. In fact, this may be the first book I have read that has taken place during the pandemic which was so prominent that it seemed like another character.
What drew me to the book initially was one of the settings of the book. It was Tahiti. Even with the pandemic, the promise of a tropical paradise was hard to resist. And the book delivered on that. There were descriptions that made my eyes water. Along with that there were scientific details about diving and research which should have interested me but went on a little too much. Not all of the book took place in Tahiti; some of it was here in New York City. In fact, somewhere in the middle were scenes that took place in Prospect Park and in my local subway station and I am not sure how I felt about that.
However, I know that I felt confused through much of the book. It went back and forth between countries, characters and times and all of this was hard to follow. I found parts of it slow and a bit tedious. While it got better toward the end, something almost happened and then didn't happen and I must confess I felt a bit cheated.
Finally, I had a hard time connecting to the characters. They were not entirely unlikeable but I couldn't really like anyone, not even the teacher (another thing that drew me to the book).
Others may like this book better; looking at other reviews, I seem to be an outlier.
None of them are at their best, and this is what pulls the novel together. It made me remember how bewildered we all were about what would happen and how we would manage until there was a vaccine. Freudenberger skillfully portrays those feelings of confusion, but the main characters are hard to empathize with. The only one wrangling quarantine, caring for a toddler nephew, keeping away from her sister's "fiancee" is Athyna, one of the stepmother's students. She's the most at risk, and we can see how her coping skills come up against those of the wealthy family. The book gets its first spark when Athyna appears, but she's not in it enough to give "The Limits" what it needs. I found myself curious about the outcome without feeling driven to get there.
Stephen is a cardiologist, married to Kate, a high school teacher, newly pregnant, divorced from Nathalie, a marine biologist working to restore coral reefs in the Pacific that were damaged by nuclear testing and climate change. Stephen and Nathalie's daughter, Pia is a 15 yr old high school student who has returned to NYC from Tahiti to attend a private school. Athyna is a 16 yr old student who is the primary caretaker for her 4 yr old nephew Marcus.
I found the character development to be superficial and while the characters were described, their interactions and responses to each other lacked depth. Pia was intelligent, and typically teenage, but her snarky, rebellious, and lying behaviors were annoying to me. She insisted that a man in Tahiti twice here age was completely in love with her (really???). Athyna seemed to have a lot of anxiety and indecision, and very little positive force in her life.
I didn't think that Nathalie was fleshed out, although her emails to Stephen were blunt. However, her research was explained in (too much) detail and it felt to me that the author was trying too hard to make points against climate change. I am a C-diver and I found this part completely irrelevant to he story.
Overall the difficulty that I had with the book was the changing countries, timelines, and characters without clear transitions. I also found the pacing to be slow with a lot of repetition, which I didn't think added to the overall story.
I received a complimentary ARC of The Limits from NetGalley and am expressing my own opinions.