A witty transatlantic debut about the perils of a bright young woman trapped behind a switchboard at one of London’s more demented City offices. The take-this-job-and-shove-it genre is a favorite among young writers for a simple reason: Most have to pay the bills in some dreadful fashion during the long gray dawn before they are ever published. Forrester’s heroine, however, finishes her novel while she works a dreadful day job. Her novel is a journal really, though she can—t quite put everything into it. Especially names. Like her own, for starters, and that of her boyfriend (who forbids her to mention him and is only referred to as the Man Who Mustn—t be Mentioned, or MWMM). And she must mind what she says about the office itself; her father assures her that libel laws are quite strict in Britain. Although her real interest is literature, The Academy of Material Science in London hired her as a receptionist fresh out of university, and she does manage to get quite a bit of writing done at her desk despite the constant ringing of the phone and the endless parade of messengers dropping off packages. But she has little faith in herself, either as a writer or a person——I ought to be able to transform my misery into something else through writing, but instead I just write about it and it stays the same——and most of the time her affair with the MWMM seems as pointless to her as her manuscript does. Is she deluded? Or just inexperienced? Eventually, she concludes that “the beginning of love is a story, the end of love is a story, but before the end the middle might mean anything.” Something plenty of married couples and successful authors take a lifetime to discover. Candid, fresh, and likable: Forrester’s naturalistic tone and elegant voice more than compensate for her slightly—and endearingly—aimless narrative.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86292-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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