A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life.
Another literary high-wire performance by a novelist who is establishing himself as a unique voice in contemporary fiction.
This novel shares significant qualities with its predecessor (An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England, 2007), which provided a critical breakthrough for Clarke. Both have protagonists who are good-hearted, well-intentioned and self-delusional, thus as unreliable as they are likable. And both have a metafictional, book-about-books quality. In this case, as the title suggests, the creative springboard is Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, a memoirist novel that itself confuses the real with the imagined. Here is what the reader knows for sure: Nine-year-old Miller lives in Watertown, N.Y., with his mother, a lawyer specializing in domestic-abuse cases among the military. His father, whom Miller loves and who left the family, is obsessed with Exley’s novel, so much so that its setting brought him to Watertown. Miller is so precociously intelligent that he has leapfrogged to the eighth grade. He narrates most of the novel. He also sees a therapist to help him deal with the absence of his father and his inability to distinguish the actual from the imaginary (a coping mechanism). The therapist develops some identity issues of his own. Miller’s father may have been a professor, an alcoholic, an adulterer, or all or none of them. Miller is convinced that his father enlisted to fight in the war in Iraq, and has returned from combat in critical condition to the local VA hospital. He also believes that if he can find Exley he will save his father’s life. Yet Exley in real life is dead, according to a biography by Jonathan Yardley (the book critic who also emerges as a character here). “Sometimes you have to tell the truth about what you’ve done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven’t done,” says Miller, who is in for as many surprises as the reader.
A seriously playful novel about the interweave of literature and life.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-608-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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