The upshot: She doesn’t have much of a story, and neither do we.
Rower’s second, as dismal as its predecessor (Armed Response, 1995), trades the former’s West Coast trappings for the Hamptons as the artist/writer narrator tries desperately to turn the dead wives of rival painters William de Kooning and Jackson Pollock into posthumous friends—and straighten out her own life in the bargain. She’s just discovered, after 20 years of living with a man, that she herself is turned on by one of her butch students, and her first off-season sojourn on the upscale side of Long Island, ostensibly to write a book that she’d been working on for years, turns into a full-fledged affair when Iris clomps into her life. But that doesn’t stop her obsession with Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, which translates into daily trips to the cemetery where they’re buried and endless ruminations on how to carry out her scheme. Unfortunately, the Iris thing barely survives the off-season, leaving only a desire for more lesbian loving and foggy notions about Lee and Elaine. Two years later, after she’s finally ditched her lover Jack by tricking him into moving back to his ailing mother in Brooklyn, the Hamptons beckon again, and this time her project involves interviewing as many of Elaine de Kooning’s and Lee Krasner’s friends as she can persuade to see her. With no romantic entanglements, there’s progress of a sort, but for all the success she has insinuating herself among the Hamptons elite, the longed-for hint of a real-life friendship having existed between her subjects never surfaces.
The upshot: She doesn’t have much of a story, and neither do we.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 1-85242-416-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
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