Greer’s best feature as a novelist is his willingness to keep trying new things. Let’s hope his next book avoids the worst...
World War II shapes and complicates a young married couple’s shared and separate lives in this latest from California author Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004, etc.).
What narrator Pearlie Cook says of her introverted spouse Holland (“We think we know the ones we love.”) applies also to herself, in one of several surprise twists taken by Greer’s slowly unfolding plot. We learn early on that she met shy, handsome neighbor Holland Cook in grade school in their native Kentucky. After Holland enlisted and went overseas, Pearlie moved to California, where she volunteered for a military organization, then married the wounded returning soldier (further burdened by congenital illness), devoted herself to creating a peaceful, loving environment and bore him a son (who would be stricken with poliomyelitis). Her family’s story becomes entangled with that of “Buzz” Drumer, Holland’s hospital roommate, whose disclosures overturn everything Pearlie thought she knew, and confirm her determination to protect her husband and son—though, she’ll eventually acknowledge, she has managed instead “to step on and alter a war, and a marriage, and the course of several lives.” Greer creates numerous moving moments, but they’re often obscured by emotionally charged figurative language and imperfectly dramatized expressions of enlightened social and political attitudes. (If only George Orwell had edited this book…) Little more can be said without revealing the novel’s crucial surprises—except that the author simply tries too hard, and the reader balks at its surplus of sentimentality.
Greer’s best feature as a novelist is his willingness to keep trying new things. Let’s hope his next book avoids the worst excesses of this one.Pub Date: May 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-10866-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
Florian’s seventh collection of verse is also his most uneven; though the flair for clever rhyme that consistently lights up his other books, beginning with Monster Motel (1993), occasionally shows itself—“Hello, my name is Dracula/My clothing is all blackula./I drive a Cadillacula./I am a maniacula”—too many of the entries are routine limericks, putdowns, character portraits, rhymed lists that fall flat on the ear, or quick quips: “It’s hard to be anonymous/When you’re a hippopotamus.” Florian’s language and simple, thick-lined cartoons illustrations are equally ingenuous, and he sticks to tried-and-true subjects, from dinosaurs to school lunch, but the well of inspiration seems dry; revisit his hilarious Bing Bang Boing (1994) instead. (index) (Poetry. 8-10)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-202084-5
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.
Two women, two Greek tragedies, one modern revamping.
British classicist Haynes writes a rejoinder—in fiction—to the near muteness of women in ancient Western texts. As she did with her psychological thriller, The Furies (2014), Haynes dives straight for Sophocles’ monumental plays. This time, she puts a mother and daughter on center stage instead of Sophocles’ title characters in Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. Each woman has “the sense that someone was nearby, wishing her ill.” For Queen Jocasta of Thebes, it is the housekeeper Teresa, whose wickedness puts Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca to shame. For Jocasta’s youngest child, Ismene, the menace arrives in the first chapter. An orphan from age 5, the bookish 15-year-old leaves her reading nook only to be knifed by a stranger in the assumed safety of the palace. This thwarted political assassination dissolves into Chapter 2, which introduces Jocasta at the same age, bundled off a generation earlier to wed Thebes’ fossilized King Laius. This complex opening structure settles into chapters that alternate between the two women. The device works well, building tension as mother and daughter both struggle with confinement, treachery, politics, and hair. (Some verities apparently hold for 2.5 millennia.) After Laius dies, Jocasta becomes notorious—and thanks to Sophocles, immortal—for unwittingly marrying her son, Oedipus. This Gordian knot of incest still has the power to shock, and Haynes is deft with it and with its consequences for the next generation. Her grasp of the ancient city-state is marvelously firm. Her sturdy sentences conjure the punishing Greek summer heat that quells movement and the gold rings bunching the fat on the fingers of florid men. But unlike the classically inspired novels of Madeline Miller or Colm Tóibín, antiquity bogs down in Haynes’ expository prose. And while the author adds an intriguing new character, the physician Sophon who is instrumental to both mother and daughter, the women themselves remain too flat on the page.
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-480-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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