Not a perfect work, but an unarguably major one. Byatt’s quartet is well worth the time and attention it demands.
The life of the mind and the confusions of the spirit confront one another to often telling effect in Byatt’s lavishly orchestrated eighth novel.
This big, somewhat unruly book concludes the quartet Byatt began 25 years ago with The Virgin in the Garden (1978), which, along with its hefty successors, Still Life (1985) and Babel Tower (1996), focused with mandarin precision on the moral and intellectual growth of ever-optimistic Frederica Potter. As this story begins, Frederica, still hoping to become a writer, is employed as a television hostess and interviewer—a position that “educates” her through introductions to a society full of eccentrics, cranks, and obsessives. There’s a hint of C.P. Snow’s vast Strangers and Brothers series in the broad sociopolitical range, which extends to the minutiae of genetic research and computer science, the politics of higher education (including the establishment of a combative “anti-university,” on the outskirts of an actual college), and a seeming epidemic of pathological violence, one instance of which produces a radical religious group that calls itself “Spirit’s Tigers.” A great deal of specific information is thus crammed into this formidably complex story, but the sometimes oppressively learned Byatt has a compensatory gift for locating what she has elsewhere called “passions of the mind” in vivid and interesting characters—painstakingly real, searching ones like the well-meaning (and genuinely intelligent) Frederica and her brother Marcus, a compassionate, thoughtful scientist—and flamboyant Dickensian grotesques, including New Age psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, pop poet of the moment Mickey Impey, and fundamentalist charismatic “Josh Lamb,” a muscular Christian with a murderous agenda. Images of blood and fire are worked (rather laboriously) into the narrative, yet whenever the reader’s brain isn’t simply too overburdened, A Whistling Woman excites and satisfies, because Byatt has learned from her idol Iris Murdoch the technique of creating characters whose obsessions appear to rise from deep within, and appropriate their rich, mysterious personalities.
Not a perfect work, but an unarguably major one. Byatt’s quartet is well worth the time and attention it demands.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41534-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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