The death of an old friend provokes a trip to the past in a somber little novel about sex, drugs, and poetry in Glasgow in the '80s. The Scottish Graham's bland, pseudo-documentary style disguises the rudimentary mechanics of this low-life melodrama. Kevin Previn is a 35-year-old performance artist, poet, and playwright who abandoned his native Glasgow ten years earlier when the scene there became too depressing: The mother of his son joined his best friend in the bliss of heroin addiction; fatherhood and joblessness sent Kevin himself spiraling into madness, for which he was institutionalized; and life in general got ``weirder and fuzzier.'' Now, after a decent life in London, Kevin's best friend, Michael Illingworth, has died from AIDS. The author of two books, Thus Spake Andy Schuster and The Book of Man, Mike was a bisexual hedonist with a penchant for adolescent existential ranting. The quotations from his second book, which provide the epigraphs to each chapter here, prove him a thinker of high-school profundity (``...whatever you believe in, you should know it's cruel; and if you believe in nothing, there's only cruelty'') rather than the ``genius'' Kevin considers him. On assignment for a TV documentary about Mike, Kevin returns to Glasgow, but his project turns out to be more about himself. He recalls all the horrors of his deprived youth, his screw-ups at school, his botched relationship with his son's mother, his electroshock treatments, and the numerous other indignities for which he holds society in contempt. Kevin's the sort of PC fool who wishes he were gay just to annoy his homophobic dad; and he remains tedious in what seem his effortful hopes to shock readers with comments like ``I was so much in love I'd have used her shit for toothpaste.'' Graham's amateurish writing poses as authenticity, but it's mainly false grit.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-85242-390-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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