Enderby the Poet—corpulent, flatulent, malicious—arrived, full of bile and Joycean brio, in Enderby (1968). He took a look at New York circa 1973 in The Clockwork Testament (1975), promptly dying of a heart attack. And now, "to placate kind readers. . . who objected to my casually killing my hero," Enderby is resurrected circa 1976—in a brief, heavyhanded, disappointing episode. This time the prim poet is in Terrebasse, Indiana (that's the level of the wordplay here), hired to write the libretto for a musical about Will Shakespeare. His collaborators, of course, are a cartoonishly crude lot—they want show-biz, not Enderby's intricately rhymed Elizabethan-style verses. The show's backer is ostentatious local matron Mrs. Schoenbaum (more than a whiff of anti-Semitism here), whose favorite spiritualist claims to be in touch with Shakespeare's understandably riled-up ghost. But the co-star, in the Dark Lady role, is gorgeously black pop-diva April Elgar—and Enderby, smitten with lust, is soon tailoring the show to her non-Elizabethan talents. April, who switches back and forth between crude New Yorkese and a "slave whine" (both imperfectly rendered), is actually nice and educated; she invites Enderby to her Carolina home for Christmas (where he must pose as a clergyman, preaching an incoherent sermon to a Baptist congregation); she is not unresponsive to Enderby's infatuation. Still, Enderby—for "aesthetic" reasons—declines to convert his lust into reality, confining himself to masturbation. ("He had to cart the engorged shlong three times into the bathroom. . . .") And, in the ill-staged slapstick finale, the poet is forced to take over the role of Shakespeare on the opening night of the show. . . now titled Actor on His Ass. Burgess bulks out this thin novella with two labored Shakespeare fantasies—one at the beginning (WS drafts the 46th Psalm for the King James Bible), the other at the end (WS and time-travelers). He includes many examples of Enderby's hard-working libretto. But the central comic situation never comes to satiric life (mystery-writer Simon Brett would have gotten more laughs from it); the love-story manquÉ is limp; and the two strengths of the previous novels—the Enderby character, the rococo narration—only flair sporadically in this twiddling spin-off.
Pub Date: April 1, 1984
ISBN: 0070089760
Page Count: 160
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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