Miss Tyler again explores family connections in terms of compensatory stress and balances, necessary exclusions, and the loneliness of outsiders resisting absorption. Mrs. Emerson is the vortex of the Baltimore Emerson family, a widow "wearing pastels, holding out smooth white hands with polished nails," to receive her intermittently returning seven children whom she controls with charged verbiage: "Oh, everything she said nowadays was attached to other things by long gluey strands. . . touching off chords, opening doors." College drop-out Elizabeth comes into the echoing Emerson house — open, easygoing, attracted to the welter of disconnections as only an uncommitted drifter, with an urge to heal, can be. She becomes Mrs. Emerson's handyman (a chic conversation piece) and is bumblingly courted by sons Timothy and Matthew, who, like the other Emersons, are irresistibly drawn to a fixer and a patcher. But Timothy commits suicide, and Elizabeth, blaming herself, leaves for her own home where the clocks all run on time and no one needs or wants feelings which cannot be prepared ahead and frozen. Elizabeth slips away from marriage at the last minute and is on her way to some kind of freedom when the Emersons, rallied around Mrs. Emerson and her recent stroke, lure her back. Her new name becomes "Gillespie" (the result of Mrs. Emerson's impaired speech) and with relentless family pressure, including a murder attempt by an unstable son Andrew, Elizabeth's fate is sealed as ultimate handyman in a family "closed around nothing. . . all huddled up together scared to go out." Another gently insidious exposure of the adders under the veranda.
Pub Date: April 1, 1972
ISBN: 0449911799
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
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
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