Finch treats serious issues whimsically without being flippant, to deeply entertaining effect.
A fast-paced, bizarre, iconoclastic farce anchored by an endearing filial relationship between a journalist and his assistant.
Finch’s novel follows Arthur Magpie—abrasive, highbrow, English journalist and high-functioning, chain-smoking alcoholic—who almost always calls his assistant “darling” and crashes his automobile into something on almost every road. The narrator of the tale is Arthur’s assistant, Ian Swansea, who recounts in an author’s note that he was employed by Mr. Magpie from 2002-2010, following their first chance encounter during an incident involving stampeding bulls, loose from a staged apocalypse complete with ceremonial robes and a Venetian mask. Finch’s book is exhaustively funny; as Arthur and Ian move from assignment to assignment, there are book jokes, philosophy jokes, smutty jokes, pratfalls and shtick, and wild plot turns around every corner. The story is as outlandish as its chapter titles, which include “Another Donkey Holiday,” “Disco Cupcakes” and “Burning the Ken.” The one-liners are riotous—“Christ was a lot of things, but he was a socialist first and foremost”—and lampooned versions of political figures and authors, the targets of Arthur’s cutting pen or irreverent tongue, are amusing. But the strongest laughs come from the work Finch puts into developing Arthur and Ian’s rapport. Most of the novel reads like an idea for a whodunit drowned in Benzedrine and barbiturates and re-imagined as a satire of the last few decades. Without the genuinely caring master-acolyte relationship, the book is multidirectional to the point of being a bit of a blur. So many characters are introduced and continents traversed, literally and metaphorically, that the loose plot doesn’t unwind until the end of Chapter 5 (out of 10), “After Hours in the Afterlife,” when it’s revealed that the death threat Arthur received earlier was perpetrated by a former student, and that the story racing toward resolution, peaceful or bloody, regards the plot on Arthur’s life. Through it all, Arthur doesn’t stop for air, and readers won’t either, so long as they don’t mind diversions.
Finch treats serious issues whimsically without being flippant, to deeply entertaining effect.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615540122
Page Count: -
Publisher: Carrier Pigeon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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