An off-key Midwestern reminiscence with a self-pitying air of despondency.
A sensitive young college student is haunted by his hometown and the girl he never quite managed to leave behind.
The homecoming novel is such a tricky business—all that aching pining, the pregnant pauses, the glossy remembrances of truly ordinary moments. It’s all here in the deftly composed but emotionally sodden debut novel by essayist and literary critic Lytal. This go-round is sincere to the point of exasperation, while the whole story is trying so hard to be something weightier than its parts. Young Jim Praley has come home from the big city to visit his parents in Tulsa, a hometown that Praley delights in spinning into fables for his friends, his “Tulsa stories.” At a party, Jim meets Adrienne Booker, the bright beating heart of the Tulsa art and music scene, who ruthlessly and casually sleeps with him. They spend a summer kind-of together, barring the bisexual advances of Adrienne’s BFF Chase Fitzpatrick. Eventually, the romance simply fizzles out, and Jim returns to the East Coast to finish college and work at a small literary press. Drowning himself in parties and work years later, Jim is startled when he gets word from Chase that Adrienne has been seriously injured in a drunken motorcycle accident. Unfortunately, the narrative falls off a cliff in this second half as Jim reconnects with friends, fences with Adrienne’s family and contemplates staying in Tulsa with his broken ex-girlfriend. Lytal writes with compassion, but the long poetic sequences about walking around a city get a bit melodramatic over time. “I had used downtown as the backdrop to a love story—but most people aren’t so willful. At their roots, the skyscrapers are dumb,” he writes. Neither offbeat enough to keep readers’ attentions nor poignant enough to justify its lingering melancholia, the whole sad affair winds up feeling like a half-finished love letter at the bottom of a drawer.
An off-key Midwestern reminiscence with a self-pitying air of despondency.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-14-242259-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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