The concluding volume of Matthiessen’s Florida trilogy (Killing Mister Watson,1990; Lost Man’s River, 1997) brings stunningly alive sugarcane farmer, patriarch, and multiple murderer E.J. Watson, whose life and crimes have been detailed by his contemporaries and descendants, including his estranged son Lucius. This time, Watson himself tells the story, beginning in South Carolina in the aftermath of the Civil War. Edgar grows up among a tense family dominated by his brutal and drunken father Elijah (“Lige”), an unregenerate racist, and fragmented by its mixed opinion about his abolitionist Uncle Selden (“The Traitor”), whose idealism exacts a heavy toll. Violently rejecting his father’s tyranny, Edgar leaves home, works on a Watson family plantation in Georgia, moves west (where he earns a reputation as “fugitive and frontier desperado” and as the probable murderer of Belle Starr), before returning to the South to build an empire near Key West as a prosperous cane merchant. This is Matthiessen’s Absalom, Absalom!: a richly imagined, compulsively readable chronicle of the progress and hard times of its powerfully imagined central figure. In strikingly cadenced prose (at times reminiscent of Robert Penn Warren’s long stately sentences), Watson—an intense autodidact who “loved to talk elaborately in the elegant English found in books, and . . . loved to tell stories”—emerges as a fascinating bundle of contradictions: a much-married husband and father hellbent on shaping a world fit for his kin to inhabit; a ruthless predator indifferent to the fragile ecology of Florida’s pristine Everglades; a child of his culture’s racial divisions forever shadowed by the “darker brother” who contains both his hidden and better selves; and a perpetrator of violence whose “outlaw” legend far outstrips the actual evil he commits. A brilliant character study, and a provocative commentary on the “capitalist energies” that built modern America. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50102-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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