LeFanu’s new anthology (Obsession, 1995—co-edited by Stephen Hayward) features 16 tales energized by the upbeat power of the ’60s preoccupation with death, dancing, and sex. Most of these stories accept the 1960s as a kind of paradigm of hedonism, examining what has happened to our perceptions of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll in the years since. Laurie Colwin’s sunny, steeply uplifting “The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing” (from her 1981 collection, The Lone Pilgrim) nicely captures the ’60s first innocence and begins: “Once upon a time, I was Professor Thorne Speizer’s stoned wife, and what a time that was.” Colwin’s hash-laced reefer prose powerfully evokes a nostalgia for a time now thoroughly vanished, and is alone worth the price of the book. The other pieces offer a considerably more sardonic take on sex and salvation, tracing the ways in which reality has overtaken those by now long-ago expectations of transcendence, and illuminating what such things as sex, drugs, and fantasy mean to us now. John Saul’s conjugally delicious “Honeymoon” tells of a European couple in sex-addled Copenhagen who seem to be writing a handbook on 21st-century lovemaking based on their own research between the hotel sheets. The hallucinating young heroine of Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born To Bleed” has taken two tabs of LSD and feels like an eel being boiled, which is hardly the right time to face the huge fright of her first period. In “The Story of No,” Texan writer Lisa Tuttle probes the damage worked by forbidden lust/forbidden dreams, updating the famous porno classic The Story of O in nicely postmodern fashion. As Philip Larkin noted, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963. If, with the rock band Dr. Hook, you can sing of the ’60s that “I was stone and I missed it,” here’s a perfectly legal, nonparanoid way to recapture days that have disappeared over the hills like wild horses.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-85242-538-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
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