A very impressive debut with a well-developed protagonist.
In Kostival’s debut novel, a man deals with the fact that his body is turning to bone.
Morris Proot was diagnosed at 29 with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, a very rare but real and horrible condition in which the body’s bone-repair mechanism goes haywire. Any injury, however minor, encourages inappropriate, superfluous bone growth; eventually, sufferers’ bodies lock up. Ten years on, Morris is cobbling together a life for himself near Portland, Maine, as a school bus driver. He lives alone in an apartment with lots of books and scant furniture. He’s no friend of humanity at large; in fact, he’s understandably resentful and cynical. But he’s also friends with a crusty old man named Cap and in love with a woman named Joan. After Cap dies and Joan moves away, Morris begins to write long letters to a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania who’s the world’s leading expert on FOP. These letters, in fact, make up half of the novel, and Morris becomes frustrated that the doctor doesn’t answer them. Morris is relegated to a job as a crossing guard after fighting with a parent and unsuccessfully attempts suicide. Finally, he heads to Philadelphia to confront the doctor, and readers discover the truth about the letters. Kostival is a very strong writer, and Morris is a tour de force of a character—he’s bitter, yes, and spends most of his time railing against the human condition in general and his own condition in particular, as seen in his letters to the doctor. But he’s also shown to be capable of loving those who are lovable, and he’s immensely intelligent and well-read. One may open the book anywhere and encounter a striking line, such as “Proot’s revanchist anger was met blow-for-blow by [bus passenger] Fetal Hitler’s irredentist rage.”
A very impressive debut with a well-developed protagonist.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9984146-3-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Radial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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