The corporate downscaler as serial killeran appealing conceit given long, lumpy, lifeless treatment in the pseudonymous Barrow's debut. Michael Woodrow is a flawlessly handsome management consultant based in Chicago who jets all over the country telling ailing businesses how to cut their costs by firing people. Michael also does some more literal cutting himself, savagely murdering a series of 40-ish women who come on to him in Florida, in Michigan, in San Antonio. Michael's obviously never been able to come to terms with his father's murder of his faithless wifea crime for which Norman Woodrow, who promised Michael he wouldn't abandon him, did 18 years in stir. Now Michael's being tracked on behalf of his Florida victim by ``researcher'' Victor Flam, who's such a bulldog that he keeps on coming even when the victim's mother pulls him off the case. Norman's new neighbor, Lizabeth Seaver, a schoolteacher of 35, is clearly cast as Michael's good angel, but will Michael be able to seize the redemption she offers before cheesy, bullying Flam closes in on him? It's a good question, but Barrow drains the juice from his story by reducing his weakly imagined supporting cast to walk-ons, simplifying angelic Lizabeth and demonic Flam within an inch of their lives, and cocooning Michael and his father in reams of dim, gratuitous flashbacks filling in every conceivable blank in their motivation (there's even time for Norman's retrospective salute to Burt Lancaster's '50s films). Barrow eschews the usual pulpish pleasures of the psycho-killer genre for psychological depth; but instead of coming off as complex, tortured souls, Michael and his father end up, via all this background info, as tiresome veterans condemned to swapping the same old war stories forever. Barrow's quite original keynote for this unthrilling thriller is tristesse. But readers who breathe all this dead air are likely to be the saddest folks of all.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-94047-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
A group of strangers who live near each other in London become fast friends after writing their deepest secrets in a shared notebook.
Julian Jessop, a septuagenarian artist, is bone-crushingly lonely when he starts “The Authenticity Project”—as he titles a slim green notebook—and begins its first handwritten entry questioning how well people know each other in his tiny corner of London. After 15 years on his own mourning the loss of his beloved wife, he begins the project with the aim that whoever finds the little volume when he leaves it in a cafe will share their true self with their own entry and then pass the volume on to a stranger. The second person to share their inner selves in the notebook’s pages is Monica, 37, owner of a failing cafe and a former corporate lawyer who desperately wants to have a baby. From there the story unfolds, as the volume travels to Thailand and back to London, seemingly destined to fall only into the hands of people—an alcoholic drug addict, an Australian tourist, a social media influencer/new mother, etc.—who already live clustered together geographically. This is a glossy tale where difficulties and addictions appear and are overcome, where lies are told and then forgiven, where love is sought and found, and where truths, once spoken, can set you free. Secondary characters, including an interracial gay couple, appear with their own nuanced parts in the story. The message is strong, urging readers to get off their smartphones and social media and live in the real, authentic world—no chain stores or brands allowed here—making friends and forming a real-life community and support network. And is that really a bad thing?
An enjoyable, cozy novel that touches on tough topics.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7861-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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