A lively addition to that popular English subgenre, the academic novel: Oakley has fun with feminism and with her...
A first novel by well-known feminist Oakley (Telling the Truth about Jerusalem, Taking it Like a Woman): an oddly dated academic satire about professors of either sex who have affairs and go to the library to find out what they mean.
Each chapter here uses an epigraph from The Second Sex to light the way, so that the characters—however manic or lust-ridden they become—serve mostly as ironic footnotes to Simone de Beauvoir. The plot centers on Charity Walton and Mark Carleton, two sociology professors who get the hots for each other—Mark because he gets the hots for every attractive woman he sees, and Charity because she thinks it's time to have an affair. At times the subsequent social comedy is delightful, at times too structured with laboriously staged polemic, too stiffly expository. "What happens next?" Charity asks Mark, who is a kind of academic operator, juggling affairs and working forever on a book about the "social construction of everyday life." Well, anyone could tell her the answer: Charity leaves her husband (who is having his own affair); Mark can't quite bring himself to leave his wife Jane and his children; but then he does leave them (after Charity tries to kill him). He moves in with Charity, moves back to Jane, and returns to Charity, though by then he's having other affairs, finally a serious one with Tessa, who wants his child. He leaves Charity for Tessa but, in the year 2000, he meets Charity in Amsterdam, fulfilling an old remembered promise, because love is mystical. A large Cast of characters, meanwhile, flit in and out, reading books, theorizing, and doing various academic stunts, some slapstick, some life-shaking.
A lively addition to that popular English subgenre, the academic novel: Oakley has fun with feminism and with her characters, but her situations and insights are largely passé.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0006543359
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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