Here you have three fascinating stories bound together. You have the novelised, or very nearly televisualised, life of Sigmund Freud. You have a Broadway musical about the visit of Leon Trotsky to New York in 1917. And, some way into the future, you have the crushing of the planet Earth by a heavyweight intruder from a distant galaxy. . . . These three stories are all the same story: they are all about the end of history as man has known it." So says Burgess in his cheery blurb here. But, while those three separate novelettes are indeed chopped up and offered in alternating chunks throughout, they don't coalesce thematically (even if Burgess sees Freud, socialism, and outer-space as the century's Big Three items); nor does the revolving focus really achieve what Burgess calls a "new way of reading"—changing channels, as on TV. And readers will probably wind up sampling this Burgess bagatelle (if at all) by choosing one of the storylines and following it through, skipping over the other two. The Freud bio is best; it's partly a parody of the Irving Stone/TV-movie approach to pop-biography, beginning with the dying Freud leaving Vienna and then moving into the usual flashbacks (" 'I'm sick of you and your dreams,' Martha said, pouring coffee. 'If it's not one thing it's another. First it's Oedipus. Now it's dreams' "); but it's impressive, too, as it eruditely packs virtually every highlight of stormy psychoanalytic history into tiny vignettes (Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Anna); and it manages to convey a hint of Freud-as-genuine-tragic-hero—while also leaping into the fanciful (Freud and Jung playing free-association games, Freud conversing with his cancer). The science-fiction novella is so-so: world's-end is nigh as a planet called Lynx is on collision course with future Earth; an elite handful is selected for spaceship survival, including ouranologist Vanessa Frame but not including her sci-fi-writer husband Valentine; the focus shifts back and forth between the doomed Earthlings and: the pre-flight spaceship (where tyranny and mutiny simmer); so there's an uprising at the end, with some of the good guys taking over the ship. And the Trotsky musical? Well, it's pretty dull, silly stuff—Trotsky falling in love, being tempted by capitalism—especially since the heavily-rhymed song lyrics are far too ambitious to be read as parody. A minor-Burgess potpourri, then—with occasional fun, lots of talent on indiscriminate display. . . and, despite the author's assurances ("This book is very deep"), considerably less than meets the eye.
Pub Date: March 21, 1983
ISBN: 0070089655
Page Count: 408
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
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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