A tender and tragic remembrance, though mainly of interest to the author’s most devoted fans.
William Styron’s daughter recalls her love-hate relationship with the literary lion.
The author’s reputation as a leading 20th-century American fiction writer made his homes in Connecticut and Martha’s Vineyard lively gathering places for the country’s elite authors: Peter Matthiessen, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer and many others regularly talked, argued and drank (heavily) in his living rooms. But Alexandra Styron (All the Finest Girls, 2001) is more fixated on the brooding, mercurial man who dominated and terrified her after the parties ended. By the time Alexandra was a teenager, most of her father’s triumphs as a fiction writer were behind him (in a sweet passage, she recalls her blushing attempts to read the sex scenes in Sophie’s Choice as a tween). Her observations focus less on his books and more on his verbal abuse of her mother and siblings, his long absences fueled by alcohol or work and his bouts with depression, which led to his acclaimed book, Darkness Visible (1990), but drained the family’s emotional reserves. Perusing her father’s papers, she finds reams of failed attempts to recapture the glories of Lie Down in Darkness (1951) and The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Interviewing his former colleagues, she discovers a writer who was emotionally fragile even at his most successful. An official biography of Styron has already been written (James L.W. West III’s William Styron: A Life, 1998), and Alexandra doesn’t feel compelled to compete with it. Sometimes that’s an asset: She can be brutally frank and intimate about her frustrations with her father, especially during his long decline before his death in 2006. But the book, expanded from a New Yorker essay, also feels somewhat centerless. The author takes long leaps back and forth across time, and her attempts to integrate her own frustrations as an aspiring actress and fiction writer feel tacked-on. In the book as in her life, she struggles to assert her own personality but ultimately plays a secondary role to her father.
A tender and tragic remembrance, though mainly of interest to the author’s most devoted fans.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9179-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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