Pesetsky's fourth novel (Confessions of a Bad Girl, 1989, etc.)—purportedly the collected journals and archives of a 30-ish little-known poet dying slowly of a fatal illness—is a vervy, muscular hodgepodge that reads like a collaboration among Grace Paley, Nora Ephron, and Erica Jong: part ethnic stew, part sitcom, part frenetic affairs of the heart. Bernadette Amy Berne has been sick for years with a disease of the nervous system: ``The nerves sizzled and greedily danced to a heathen melody that I didn't control.'' She decides to catalogue her life—``I have recreated my life....Packed away all these meaningful scraps...the necessary journal entries.'' In a series of boxes or archives, given to us as snapshots, we learn that Bernadette reached her vocation of poet early—before she met her husband (``If ever I had a calling, he was it''); her first mentor, Mrs. Talmadge (``Sex is always going to be a woman's fate. Write poems about that''); as well as Cousin Helene, whom she chooses as her literary executor, and the Cousins, a group of people (who may or may not be her relatives) who meet on Long Island from time to time. The story is not so much a straightforward chronicle, however, as an orchestration of an ensemble of secondary characters (Bernadette: ``Whenever we moved, we acquired people'') around whom the stricken poet, who exasperates her husband by becoming celibate and her professor son by taking her poems seriously. ``To whom does the artist bequeath his life?'' Pesetsky's answer is this novel of ``papers...that will illuminate my life.'' The result is occasionally flimsy or fragmentary, but often the surreal non sequiturs and an idiosyncratic voice keep the reader off-balance but entertained. Pesetsky comments brightly on the need to take art and life seriously in a world that sometimes seems to have little time for either.
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-018302-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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