Sharp, funny look at life and love in down-and-dirty New York.
Mary Bellanova’s good-for-nothing boyfriend Primo has been dead for hours . . . and she just thought he was watching TV.
That’s what she gets for loving an unemployed musician, even though she doesn’t really love him anymore. But Mary’s determined to get to the bottom of things, whether or not the “doughnutarian” cops who briefly camp out in her roach-infested apartment to investigate will help. She heads for the distant land of Flushing to talk to Primo’s wheelchair-bound mother, who’s a little too senile to remember much, then returns to the filthy streets of the East Village to track down his many former lovers and meet the wife Primo never bothered to mention: an ex-stripper turned foul-mouthed rock musician. Like most of these people, Mary is a loser herself and proud of it, living by dead-end temp jobs, hanging out in grungy bars, and opting for mostly meaningless sex until something better comes along. Eventually, she finds out that Primo was cheating on her—surprise, surprise—and, worst of all, lying about his age. Her slacker stud was well over 40, an unforgivable offense in this youthful but not innocent milieu, where anything goes and nothing much matters. Not only that, but he was dosing himself with enough Viagra to kill a Tijuana donkey. For all his vaunted edginess, author Nersesian (Manhattan Loverboy, not reviewed) offers a solidly constructed albeit slight plot that moves right along, and the members of his cast are carefully drawn. All the zany downtown types keep the action humming, although this cult novelist would rather be tough than trendy: there are no dot-com zillionaires or Park Avenue princesses slumming in his neighborhood.
Sharp, funny look at life and love in down-and-dirty New York.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-671-77542-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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