The whole truth with no reservations: not a pretty story, but a rare telling.
The continuation of O’Neill’s autobiographical debut, Digging the Vein (2006), even more caustic than its predecessor.
After a quick recount of his descent into a massive opium habit and marriage to similarly fixed Susan, the unnamed narrator confesses the nature of his troubles. “I needed to know that Death was here, in the room, and that I was too fast, too young, and too smart for him.” Fleeing Los Angeles, the newlyweds return home to London only to enter the institutional nightmare of the city’s overflowing methadone clinics, from which the whip-smart but self-destructive musician reports with fascinating candor. He manipulates his physician while simultaneously using 12-step meetings to find drug dealers to feed his compulsions. Yet he still pretends to be part of society, whether shoplifting from his record store job or practicing his craft as a member of fly-by-night rock bands. While most of the action focuses on the desperate mechanics of addiction, O’Neill also paints London as a character and co-conspirator, illuminating the filthy squalor of council slums and the florescent detritus of a broken system. This is no redemption song. “The lie at the heart of treatment centers, the recovery industry, and self help groups is that that life off drugs is any better than life on them,” the narrator declares. “A preposterous idea. The two states coexist in a parallel sense—to say that one is preferable to the other is to miss the point entirely.” He struggles to break the kick-then-relapse cycle, but fails until he meets and falls in love with punk-rock princess Vanessa from New York. Call it a junkie fairy tale: Boy meets girl, gets clean and lives.
The whole truth with no reservations: not a pretty story, but a rare telling.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-158286-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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