If James Joyce had got his start as a Belfast Protestant with more of an interest in politics and less of a sense of humor—but with all of his scatological obsessions intact—he might have given us something close to McKinty's grim debut novel. The gritty realism that seems to be the fashion in Britain and Ireland these days has cast a long shadow over the younger generation of writers, many of whom apparently feel compelled to mimic the obsessions of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, just as young Americans have aped the simplicities of Hemingway for the last 50 years. McKinty's version of the new realism involves a walking tour of the uglier stretches of Belfast and New York, narrated from the points of view of a hunchbacked teenager and a terrorist who is very likely her father. The young girl, who lives in a Protestant neighborhood of Belfast, attempts to carry on a normal high school routine of sports, classes, and amateur theatrical productions despite the obsessive interest of a perverted biology teacher who persuades her to photograph and describe her bowel movements for him. Her father, meanwhile, a paramilitary hit man who has fled the country to avoid arrest, finds himself stuck in a Manhattan mental institution. Whether this is a mistake, a ruse to avoid deportation, or simply his natural habitat is not made much clearer than the rest of the story, which has little semblance of plot and proceeds along an uneven line from murkiness to utter incomprehensibility. To some extent, the lack of a clear storyline is part of the story in its own right, seemingly meant to express the aimlessness and deracination of the Protestant Loyalists of Ulster: ``Orphans of history with only their mad religion to give them any identity at all.'' But it also has the effect of keeping readers outside that hermetic world rather than bringing them into it. Rambling, incoherent, and gratuitously squalid.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14432-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This new blank verse translation of the first “Canticle” of Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece compares interestingly with some of the recent English versions by American poets, though it suffers particularly by comparison with Allen Mandelbaum’s graceful blank verse one. Its aim to provide “a clear, readable English version . . . that nevertheless retains some of the poetry of the original” is only imperfectly fulfilled, owing partly to moments of unimaginative informality (“In Germany, where people drink a lot”), though these are intermittently redeemed by simple sublimity (“Night now revealed to us the southern stars,/While bright Polaris dropped beneath the waves./It never rose again from ocean’s floor”). Translator Zappulla, an American Dante scholar and teacher, offers helpful historical and biographical information in an Introduction and exhaustive Notes following each of the poem’s 34 “Cantos.” Readers new to Dante may find his plainspoken version eminently satisfying; those who know the poem well may be disappointed by it.
Pub Date: April 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44280-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.
A young Muslim’s American experience raises his consciousness and shapes his future in this terse, disturbing successor to the London-based Pakistani author’s first novel, Moth Smoke (2000).
It’s presented as a “conversation,” of which we hear only the voice of protagonist Changez, speaking to the unnamed American stranger he encounters in a café in the former’s native city of Lahore. Changez describes in eloquent detail his arrival in America as a scholarship student at Princeton, his academic success and lucrative employment at Underwood Samson, a “valuation firm” that analyzes its clients’ businesses and counsels improvement via trimming expenses and abandoning inefficient practices—i.e., going back to “fundamentals.” Changez’s success story is crowned by his semi-romantic friendship with beautiful, rich classmate Erica, to whom he draws close during a summer vacation in Greece shared by several fellow students. But the idyll is marred by Erica’s distracted love for a former boyfriend who died young and by the events of 9/11, which simultaneously make all “foreigners” objects of suspicion. Changez reacts in a manner sure to exacerbate such suspicions (“I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees”). A visit home to a country virtually under siege, a breakdown that removes the fragile Erica yet further from him and the increasing enmity toward “non-whites” all take their toll: Changez withdraws from his cocoon of career and financial security (“. . . my days of focusing on fundamentals were done”) and exits the country that had promised so much, becoming himself the bearded, vaguely menacing “stranger” who accompanies his increasingly worried listener to the latter’s hotel. The climax builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense.
A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation.Pub Date: April 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101304-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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