Bracing and raw portrait of the inner life of a directionless, if passionate, suburban rebel.
The dark heart of a 1960s Levittown family is artfully revealed.
Shapiro (Life and Love, Such as It Is, 1999, etc.) chronicles the high-school years of Maude Pugh, the misunderstood daughter of a self-important artist and a socially awkward mother. The Pughs live in a house that seems to be the clone of a thousand others, but on the inside is utterly unique; her father has painted all the walls black to better display his artwork. Maude’s best friend Weesie thinks the house is a marvel, but Maude yearns for the understated elegance of Weesie’s upper-class Long Island manor. If the interior of Maude’s house is unusual, the interior of her family is even more so. Her mother and father split up over the course of the narrative, and her older brother Seth, unabashedly idolized by her parents, has disappeared from their lives, leaving Maude to bear the brunt of her parents’ brutalizing emotional eccentricities. Maude, chafing at her family’s restraints, secretly applies and wins a scholarship to attend Bay Farm, an elite private high school. Once there, Maude is introduced to both class ambition and class division: Her parents are uncomfortable because she is moving up the social ladder; her classmates fetishize her because she is an artist’s daughter with all of the requisite quirks; and Maude herself is caught between the knowledge that she doesn’t really belong among the very wealthy and a new sense of class difference. When Maude loses her scholarship and enrolls in community college, she finds herself even more of an outsider. Although the plot appears to follow the usual coming-of-age story are by concentrating on a typically angst-ridden adolescent girl, it has none of the loss-of-innocence rhetoric or false family resolutions that characterize the genre. Shapiro’s portrait of Maude is knife-sharp; she completely inhabits the consuming inner world of a painfully intelligent adolescent girl, showing Maude’s every mood, thought and desire with piercing clarity.
Bracing and raw portrait of the inner life of a directionless, if passionate, suburban rebel.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56947-431-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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