Four virtuoso performances, playfully juggling exuberant prose with sly postmodern speculations on the nature of desire, fiction, and the soul. A fascination with absorption, with the process of dissolving into some much-studied subject, seems to lie at the core of these novellas. In the title piece, a hapless biographer struggles to render something of the life of a woman who had clairvoyant powers, but finds language elusive, and truth uncertain. The deeper he digs, the less he knows. In “Bed and Breakfast,” a shady traveling accountant is at first intrigued, then obsessed, by the overwhelming numbers of “objects, ornaments and endearments” the stately owner of a bed and breakfast has accumulated. Used to living in a featureless world, he finds the mass of kitsch (from bottles to wall plaques) oddly reassuring, and in them, he discovers “History. Not a life lost, not a thought gone, not a feeling faded, but retained by these things,”a tenuous connection with simple, restorative life. Not surprisingly, he cannot imagine ever again leaving his lodgings. “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s,” the grimmest tale, features a desiccated would-be poet who tries, quite literally, to plunge into the lines, to virtually become the words, of her favorite poet, with rather grisly results. “The Master of Secret Revenges,” another faux biography, offers the life story of Luther Penner,. who creates a religion based on the principle of leveling an ingenious revenge on all those thought to have harmed one. Because these tales are by Gass (The Tunnel, 1995, etc.), they are of course much more than the sum of their odd, alarming characters and parts, and they—re full of deeply inventive wordplay, droll references to philosophy, as well as ingenious metaphors about the nature and purpose of artistic creation. Displaying crackling verbal energy, a fond fascination with the detritus of our culture (our “priceless and useless and adorable” artifacts), and a shrewd grasp of our conflicting (and conflicted) beliefs, these startling novellas remind us that Gass is the most purely original (and idiosyncratic) of our major writers.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40168-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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