Newcomer Bell creates an engaging and sympathetic character while skillfully exploring the nature of obsession and human...
A disturbing, often compelling first novel about a feisty young woman who’s had more than her share of abuse, cruelty, and loss but fights her way back to sanity.
Narrator Clarisse Broder, 31, is married to a rich, boring Wall Street guy with a fetish for dogs (his alarm clock doesn’t buzz, it barks). They met in a hospital, where Clarisse was supposedly recovering from an emergency appendectomy, and married a week later. As a result, there’s a lot he doesn’t know, and, despite Clarisse’s clever banter and wry sense of humor, it’s obvious that she’s haunted by sinister memories. The truth is that Beth, as she was once known, ran away from home at 16 and was taken in by a sadistic pimp named Ben, who tortured her physically and psychologically until she became a willing member of the stable of boys and girls he directed in S/M performances for the benefit of wealthy clients. The renamed Clarisse finds that a dull suburban existence isn’t enough to make her feel safe or happy, and there’s a nagging secret lurking just below her conscious recall. When the book of stories her husband encourages her to write develops a cult following, she worries that her past will be exposed. Desperate for relief, she decides to kill herself, but instead begins thinking about “a different type of suicide, the kind where you end up free, in a new life that you yourself decide.” To this end, she calls on Ben for help—a mistake that eventually prompts her to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in an attempt to escape him. This proves to be the first step in a harrowing flight across the country, until Beth/Clarisse winds up in the arms of a woman whose love enables her to recover her memory and her life.
Newcomer Bell creates an engaging and sympathetic character while skillfully exploring the nature of obsession and human need: a graphically violent but impressive debut.Pub Date: July 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-87035-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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