A lively but stilted novel of the blossoming jazz scene in the Midwest.
Swann’s (Paint with Words, 2016) historical novel stars a young Jewish woman discovering the Twin Cities jazz scene in the early 1960s.
Minnesota, 1963. Sarah Rosen is a student at the University of Minnesota, commuting from her parents’ home in St. Louis Park. She’s bored with her life and a little lonely when she meets an interesting-looking painter at a local art show. “I just need to catch some air,” the artist tells her, when she offers him a ride home to Minneapolis. “I could use some good music to cut loose with. Wanna dig some jazz?” The music is like nothing she’s heard before. She later writes in her diary: “He opened a door to another world, a world of people really getting down! Who, I could tell, must live harder and deeper than anyone I know. The music was so hot and sophisticated it makes what I’m used to sound like child’s play.” Soon after, Sarah’s wealthy dad dies suddenly of a heart attack, and her 16-year-old sister, Rachel—who has been fighting nonstop with her parents recently—uses his death as an opening to run away. Things take a dark turn when Rachel makes the mistake of trusting the wrong man in Minneapolis. He sleeps with her and then sells her into a prostitution ring. In order to find her sister, Sarah turns to her new jazz friends: the painter Jim K. Jensen and his friend Gil Montgomery, an alcoholic poet. Interconnected with Sarah and her scene are the stories of numerous other characters, including musicians Joe Citro and Boris Simpson and supper-club dancer “Watusi Lucy.” The streets of the Twin Cities are fraught with many dangers and temptations, but the seekers who flock there are looking for one high in particular: jazz and the freedom the music represents. Swann’s writing, with its period details and slang, manages to capture the culture—and oftentimes the naiveté—of the time and place. The narration, however, is often stiff: “Sarah had never seen live Latin dancing. She was fascinated. The dancing was sexy and hot. So hot! Yet sophisticated too, totally seductive. The dancers were mostly black and they knew the dance as well as a Latino man in a white suit and white shoes.” Other times, the prose is elegant and evocative: “The band was finished setting up. It swung, lifting its listeners in a wave of enthusiastic approval. It kicked like a mule, punched like Cassius Clay. It was a profound, almost terrible realization for Joe, that in the future music less than this would always be found wanting.” Swann presents the music scene from myriad perspectives, and there is a real pleasure in watching his characters interact and pursue their dreams. The ending wraps up a little too neatly, however, and the wooden quality of the language—and the dialogue in particular—keeps the novel from being as immersive as it should be.
A lively but stilted novel of the blossoming jazz scene in the Midwest.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-03581-8
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Roadrunner Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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