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
The various perspectives—with some characters knowing more than the reader does, while the reader knows more than...
’Tis the season for sequels—unexpected, decades removed from their well-remembered predecessors. June sees the return of Brett Easton Ellis with Imperial Bedrooms, another Elvis Costello–titled novel that revisits the lost boys of Less Than Zero, the lost men they have become a quarter-century later and the new Hollywood generation of lost girls after whom they lust. It also finds Oscar Hijuelos returning with Beautiful Maria of My Soul, the title of the lovesick ballad immortalized 20 years ago in his breakthrough novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Here, Hijuelos retells the story of that ill-fated romance from the perspective of its inspiration.
But first comes the May publication of Innocent, by Scott Turow, a sequel after 20 years to Presumed Innocent, the novel that not only launched the Chicago-based lawyer’s literary career but inspired a spate of popular courtroom procedurals. Though at least one other lawyer turned author has subsequently achieved greater commercial success, Turow remains the master of the form, at least partly because he’s more fascinated by the mysteries of the human heart than he is by the intricacies of the law. Here, suspense and discovery sustain the narrative momentum until the final pages, but character trumps plot in Innocent. The ironic title underscores the huge gap between innocence as a moral state of grace and “not guilty” as a courtroom verdict. Once again, Turow’s novel pits Rusty Sabich against Tommy Molto, former colleagues turned adversaries, with the former now chief judge of the appellate court and the latter as prosecuting attorney. Sabich remains more complicated and morally compromised, while Molto is much more certain of right and wrong. Exonerated in a murder trial 20 years ago, but his innocence never completely established, Sabich finds himself once again under suspicion after the sudden death of his mentally unstable, heavily medicated wife. As in the first novel, Sabich suffers the guilt of infidelity, but does this make him guilty of the murder Molto becomes convinced the judge has committed? Complicating the issue are the judge’s only son, more of a legal scholar than his father though with some of his mother’s emotional instability, and the whirlwind romance between the junior Sabich and the former clerk for the senior Sabich. To reveal more would undermine the reader’s own pleasure of discovery, but the judge, whether guilty or not, might prefer prison to the revelation of crucial secrets. “How do we ever know what’s in someone else’s heart or mind?” the novel asks. “If we are always a mystery to ourselves, then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?”
The various perspectives—with some characters knowing more than the reader does, while the reader knows more than others—contribute to an exquisite tension that drives the narrative. Where the title of the first novel may have presumed innocence, the sequel knows that we’re all guilty of something.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56242-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
Nothing terribly fresh here, but it goes down easily.
A flashy heroine who falls from grace, a child who helps her regain perspective, an estranged sister to reconcile with, and a couple of handsome and successful male foils—this novel has all the ingredients of a tasty beach read.
Sunshine Mackenzie is a YouTube sensation who's about to become the next Food Network star—until a hater hacks into her Twitter account and outs her as a fraud. Not only does this celebrity chef not know how to cook, but she doesn’t even have an authentic biography—her whole Southern farmer's daughter persona was created by a TV producer looking for just the right face to front a food show. When she loses everything, she slinks back to her real childhood home, which happens to be in Montauk and where she has an angry sister she hasn’t seen in years. But Sunshine isn’t one to let life knock her down without getting up again, so Dave (Eight Hundred Grapes, 2015, etc.) provides a few paths to redemption: Sunshine bonds with her young niece, makes an actual friend, and tries to win her way back into the food world by doing her own work, this time in the kitchen of a demanding, Thomas Keller–like chef. Dave tries to juxtapose authenticity, privacy, and reality with extremes of exposure and fakery in both the virtual world and the real one, but the book never really takes off with these themes. Still, Sunshine doesn’t go entirely unredeemed, and the story is fun to read in the same way cooking shows are fun to watch.
Nothing terribly fresh here, but it goes down easily.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8932-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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