Somewhat muted but eventually affecting debut narrated by its 14-year-old protagonist, a pregnant orphan too stubborn to abort her baby or to follow rules laid down by grownups. Thumbelina Skyler (indeed named for “the little girl in the fairy tale”) is a six-foot misfit whose mother Angelica, dumped by her faithless lover Lester, drives her car into a duck pond one day and promptly drowns. This leaves her daughter in the care of single (foster) mother Mrs. Leffer, and under the wing of fellow orphan Myrna, a street-smart teenager who’s also pregnant and with whom Thumbelina embarks on a series of disreputable adventures, including brief tenures as strippers and varied encounters with undependable older men (such as Myrna’s 30ish “boyfriend” Stan), climaxing with our heroine’s realization that she has probably acquired, along with a baby-to-be, “the queer disease” (Lester, it turns out, had preferred his old army buddy Marcus to Angelica ). The story begins pokily, and its impact is lessened by some overfamiliar dramatizations of teenage angst and paranoia (it takes a long time for the bespectacled, gawky Thumbelina to believe she’s attractive). But there are strong points: memories of good and bad times with beautiful, impulsive Angelica are honest and touching, as is Thumbelina’s obvious repression of facts surrounding her own pregnancy and her mother’s death. And in the last hundred pages, the novel takes off: Thumbelina’s scenes with a doctor who was her former softball coach are dazzling blends of comedy and pathos, and several interviews with childless couples seeking to adopt her baby are almost as good. The best thing here, though, is the narrator’s brisk, sardonic, grimly funny voice (“I am not sure a guy with three kids and his stomach over the top of his jeans can really love a girl who hasn’t even started ninth grade,” etc.). A nice debut that takes its time getting going, but it does win you over.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85006-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A late autumn retrospective, accomplished with a long lens, in which Lyman Ward, retired, ill and wheelchair-bound, attempts to affirm the continuity of the past and the "Doppler effect" of time by reconstructing his grandparents' lives. This in partial contrast to and rebuttal of his son at Berkeley "interested in change but only as a process. . . in values, but only as data" (the schism of his last book, All the Little Live Things). Much as one respects the amplitude of this novel and its sincerity, it all goes on and on (except for occasional present day interruptions) and one is never really very interested in Susan Burling Ward and her deracination from the cultured East to the uncivilized West in the 1870's by her husband, an engineer. It was always for her an "exile" and except for the terminal incidents ( a muted love affair which resulted in the accidental death of a child, her lover's suicide and permanent separation from her husband) there is almost no narrative incentive. The repose, however pleasant, becomes a kind of narcosis.
Pub Date: March 19, 1971
ISBN: 0141185473
Page Count: 486
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An elegant, understated book about a simple man still leaves something wanting.
In this quiet, serenely powerful novel, a man lives out his life in a remote mountain village as the bulk of the 20th century sweeps past.
Andreas Egger is a small boy, an orphan, when he's brought by horse cart to a small village in the mountains. It's 1902. The farmer who takes him in also beats him, and Andreas leaves when he turns 18. Then he goes about scraping together a living. Left with a bad limp—a vestige of a particularly bad beating—Andreas still wrests his living from the earth through hard physical labor. Decades pass. What else happens? It’s hard to say. This slim novel relies less on the engine of a plot than on the lyricism of its own poetry. Andreas does fall in love, marry, and lose his wife to a devastating avalanche that wrecks their home. The snow sweeps Andreas along in its flow. Similarly, Andreas is swept along by the major moments of the 20th century. Modernity arrives in the form of the cable cars that Andreas helps to erect on the side of the mountain. Later, television and tourists arrive, too, as Andreas looks on. Before that, though, there is the second world war to contend with. Andreas spends two months as a soldier and eight years as a prisoner of war in Russia. But this experience takes up little more than 10 pages, and then Andreas returns home. The novel seems to skim through all of these struggles, small and large, personal and historical. Seethaler, a Vienna-born writer and actor, writes with quiet serenity, elegance, and grace. But there's something almost too smooth about all of this. Lyrical as the work is, in the end it is also somehow slippery and ungraspable. Andreas is born, lives his life, and dies. So do we all. But there must be something more to say about it.
An elegant, understated book about a simple man still leaves something wanting.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-28986-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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