Through the decades with five members of the Radcliffe Class of '46—in a wan, pulse-less novel that has the limitations of the tinny Rona Jaffe genre but little of the compensating brio or drama. Adams' central figure, at least in the first half, is Megan Greene from California: plump, pretty, sensuous, bright, from a modest background (Mom is a car-hop)—and naive enough to get her 1943 heart broken, after lots of heavy petting, by an upper-class type who marries somebody else. ("Well, if that's being in love, I won't do that again. I'll settle for sex.") So Megan has affairs with a Jewish teacher and—on her visit to N.Y.C.—a black tromboneplayer. . . while her four favorite classmates have different sorts of love/sex problems. Bigoted, pretty Southern belle Lavinia, ever-cool about men, loses one beau in WW II, then quickly settles for a dull, appropriate Manhattan marriage. Fat, maternal Peg gets pregnant by a rich, boorish young Texan—and winds up with a swarm of kids and a nervous breakdown. Cathy, Catholic but otherwise barely characterized, gets jilted by a fiance, goes to California grad-school, winds up in an affair with a priest. Nice, feisty Janet, Jewish and pre-med, junks her career for bohemian marriage to sexy playwright Adam Marr, a sort of Irish Norman Mailer. And the women's lives will overlap here and there over the next 30 years, with one decade slurring into the next and virtually all major life-events occurring offstage: Peg turns to civil rights and lesbianism; Lavinia, sexually bored and panicked by age, has affairs—including one with a long-ago, crippled beau (now a rich, political biggie); Janet, losing Adam to a series of exotic women, returns to medicine; Cathy dies of cancer; and literary agent Megan has a long, rocky affair with charismatic left-winger Henry (Lavinia's sometime bedmate too)—but winds up, in a 1983 epilogue, with two lovers (Henry and the black trombonist), plus a new career down South. . . helping Peg to run a shelter for the homeless-and-unemployed. "Are some men put off by extremes of intelligence or even attractiveness in women—put off by superior women?" That's the theme of this unshapely saga—an iffy one, especially since the "superior" women here are so fuzzily drawn, so unconvincingly motivated, so oddly (in most cases) unappealing. Off-putting, too, is the marshmallow-y sentimentality beneath Adams' polished prose. Still, if this has little of the wit and shrewd social-history that lifted Mary McCarthy's The Group above gossip-sex-and-soap, it's probably Adams' most commercial fiction yet—with enough chic misery and quasi-feminist gloss to attract an audience with uncertain taste and certain pretensions.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1984
ISBN: 0671020684
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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