A WRESTLING SEASON

by Sharon Sheehe Stark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 21, 1986

In perhaps the most augustly styled first novel since Cynthia Ozick's Trust, Stark limns the seemingly unremarkable Kleeve family of Pennsylvania, mom and pop and two teen-aged kids. The dad, Trover Kleeve, is a small-time unpopular-causes lawyer, given to buying too many cars (too many things in general), an eccentric who drinks, fears, loves, and talks too much--and who makes, in the expansiveness of his irrepressible personality, a hell for wife Louise and daughter Mighty and son Michael Louise, once a postulate at a nunnery, is the most intimate victim of living with so interesting a man (Trover bears uncomfortable resemblance--as does the whole book--to an amalgam of Samuel Pollit in Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children and to Henderson in Bellow's Henderson the Rain King); and when a friend from her old days, Sister Frank, comes for a visit, for a little R&R, Louise seems to see, in contrast to Sister Frank, what lunacy she's in the middle of, living with a nut like Trover. Few sentences in the book are anything but lustrous; Stark, too, has true talent for the familial-comic (especially in a scene where Louise takes her fight truck to the carwash: being too tall, the truck damages both itself and the carwash. . .and Louise sneaks away, mortified). But the book goes essentially nowhere--or nowhere unexpected; the style can turn clotty and incredible in dialogue ("" 'Joy's a drug, I think, of the sort that keeps coming back on you, flaring up for no reason at all except that we live and love what we can, at hideous risk, as fierce as we're able, all of it so tenuous and absurd. . .'""); and a sense of flow is being constantly dammed by the exquisite crosshatching of each prose nugget, dropping a reader's emotional involvement with the book's people along the way. A superiorly written book--no small thing--but as in Stark's short stories (The Dealer's Yard, 1985), not even close to balancing literariness with propulsion.

Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: FICTION