From attorney and onetime migrant farmworker VÇa, a bewitching debut based on childhood memories of a squatters' settlement outside 1950's Phoenix. Most multicultural stories pale next to nine-year-old Beto's boyhood in the desert with his Spanish-born grandmother—who struggles to reconcile her curing powers with Catholicism—and his pagan Yaqui grandfather—who can leave his body and fly. Okies, Arkies, African-Americans, Indians who sing Irish railroad songs, transvestites, prostitutes, the Chinese grocer and cook regard each other with suspicious curiosity. Even the Fuller Brush man here is an outsider: a mutilated concentration-camp survivor. All fling about racial stereotypes but can never get away from shared food and music, mutual respect, love. (The Mighty Clouds of Joy Church allows even sinners to tap into its electrical service; the whole community is connected by extension cords.) People live in cardboard houses and junked cars, but much of the novel is very funny; and when people do suffer, it's not from their material poverty: White Vernetta became a prostitute out of sorrow following the lynching-murder of her black/Filipino boyfriend; jealousy leads to crimes of passion; people struggle with remorse for failings toward God and man. Meanwhile, VÇa's cross-cultural translations weave enchantment as Beto's grandparents initiate him into values meant to sustain him in materialistic, nontribal mainstream USA. VÇa's uneasy mix of magic realism, essay, tragedy, broad comedy, and didactic speech never quite blends, but each element- -like the different races thrown together in the desert—forms an integral part of this astonishing fictionalized tribute.
Pub Date: April 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93588-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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