Fleming’s transition from first-person opinion pieces to fiction is for the most part effortless: she’s an adept writer...
Two tight, elegantly composed and from-the-gut novellas about the rupturing effects of adultery in essentially loving marriages make up TV commentator Fleming’s (Motherhood Deferred, 1994) natural first foray into fiction.
The restrained and quietly affecting first tale, “A Married Woman,” finds Caroline Betts dyeing her gray hair in the bathroom of the USLA hospital room where her lawyer husband of 40 years, William, lies in an irreversible coma. The two grownup children who visit occasionally, self-engrossed lawyer Katie and sensitive chef Steven, are concerned about their mother’s newly calm state—suspicious, even, that she’s having an affair. But the hair-dyeing is Fleming’s device to wade into Caroline’s memory stores as she sits vigil over her beloved husband, alternately begging him not to leave her and cursing him for the shattering affair he conducted 15 years before with one of Katie’s law school friends. Caroline intuited William’s affair with April, allowing him, magnanimously, to decide for himself whether to return to their marriage or leave. William, a “serious man” and seriously in love, does return to Caroline, but the damaged marriage must reinvent itself. In “A Married Man,” by contrast, Fleming allows her outraged commentator’s opinions to assert themselves, often to hilariously ironic effect: 40ish California financial wizard and uxorious husband David vents his spleen at the TV “forgiveness” therapist that his wife, Marcia, drags him to after she reveals her one-night-stand in the backseat of a car. Ultra-efficient Marcia and their two young boys are all that David desired in life, and her seemingly senseless affair with a Vietnam vet who wears alligator shoes is the ultimate outrage—until he’s forced by adultery-specialist Mr. New Beginnings to forgive and forget.
Fleming’s transition from first-person opinion pieces to fiction is for the most part effortless: she’s an adept writer unafraid of the darknesses (and sex lives) of her characters.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6874-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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