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LAST COMES THE EGG

Name: LAST COMES THE EGG
Author: Bruce Duffy
ISBN: 0-684-80883-8

by Bruce Duffy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1997

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Holden Caulfield lives again, in this beguiling seriocomic tale. Ten years ago Duffy's first novel, The World as I Found It, re-created the life and mind of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with a radiant wit and intensity that made it one of the most highly praised debuts of the 1980s. Its successor, a comic bildungsroman set in suburbia and on the road in 1960, is not a bit less praiseworthy. The story concerns Frank Dougherty, a Maryland teenager and the only child in an energetic, self-analytical, just slightly crazy family that would fit somewhere between Salinger's Glasses and Cheever's Wapshots. When his mother unexpectedly takes ill and dies, Frank's increasingly confused relationship with his stunned father pushes him toward intimacy with neighboring families he both hopes and fears will take him in, and then complicity with two other lost and drifting kids, an orphaned black named Sheppy and Frank's antagonist and closest friend Alvy, a Boy Scout and altar boy who's given to hot-wiring cars and to spasms of inexplicable violence. The trio steal a car and head south, encountering such wonders as a pair of nubile and willing high- school girls (Tweety and Cookie), and a gentle and helpful black family who give Frank a lesson in race relations that Duffy spells out a little too baldly (``After that, colored people stopped being ghosts or negatives of white people. . . and I never saw them in remotely that same way''). But the novel hums along agreeably, powered by Frank's high-energy, ribald, plaintive voice (he's telling his story in retrospect, almost 25 years later, addressing it to his dead mother) and by several adroit variations Duffy plays on the controlling (title) metaphor, which describes the process of thinking oneself inside unfamiliar situations or other people's skins and making yourself understand them. That's sort of what a fine novel like this one does. Let's hope we don't have to wait another decade for Duffy's next one.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-684-80883-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Bruce Duffy Has Died at 70

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.