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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
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.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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