Backward, ever backward, through sentences which sinuously, sonorously curl around parenthetical phrases and elliptical clauses, "vagariously" winds this retrospective of the life of Henry Dodd Worthington as now through "experience's actual disorder and inconsecutiveness" he tries to reconcile himself as he was (sufficiently remote to elicit a third person referral) with the man he now is in late middle age. . . . This doubtful construction is only intended as a warning to readers of Mr. Cozzens' new book which is his first novel in ten years and in which he has completed his mastery of the involute sentence. (Ibid.: "Heart conturbed, with dissolution's icy wind on him he does not, he cannot, elect to look ahead and, trembling, prefigure in the final gloom of night the river's calamitous sliding without intermission over the rock edge and wreathed with spray and vapor thundering down.") For those not by patience possessed, trying. . . . En avant—with Cozzens' Last Puritan as he assembles the parts of his life which, with a certain amount of grave questioning and judicious qualifying, have been important in this spectator-participant's total experience: his birth from a long line of acknowledged academic eminence and material affluence; his grandfather, seer and sage, who lived until 99 and repudiated Freud; his first seduction—an "unnerved unable blushing boy" at the hands of-an older woman; his marriage and divorce; his impatience with the marital capriciousness of his' daughter; his own ingenuous stance as a young man who found the workaday world of money unrelated to real life and its later reversal as via a Mind Power course he achieved a Madison Avenue empire, etc. etc. This reflective reconnaissance of "the kinds of unknowing in individual human experience" if parsed and pursued to its conclusion some six lines later, is intended to have "meaning for every man." Perhaps for Mr. Cozzens' admirers, although in Henry Dodd Worthington he seems to have removed himself to a considerable degree from his time and ours.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1968
ISBN: 0151621608
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1968
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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