Holbert has gone all-in: This book is audacious. It reaches the heights and then keeps rising so far over the top one...
A bloody Western set during the 1930s, Holbert’s debut novel follows an amoral lawman hunting an amoral killer in the rugged, rapidly changing rural counties of Washington State.
Holbert’s unsettling book demands a strong stomach: The violence is graphic, and sublime prose is cheek-by-jowl with ridiculous conceits. Whether the violence is gratuitous is a question the book begs but avoids answering, but one’s pleasure may turn with one’s stomach. At the end the reader will feel relief or satisfaction or some combination, and tip a sweat-stained hat to Holbert for raising the stakes of the Western genre. The protagonist Russell Strawl’s name says it all, rhyming with drawl and squall, but the participle of another rhyme is the best word to describe him: appalling. Pure antagonism, Strawl travels light as a contagious disease and falls like a curse. He has superhuman hearing, which seems a prerequisite for his in- or sub-human behavior. We are expected to believe in types: in Keystonish cops, fops, sots and a young man who answers only to the name of a prophet. The plot is as tortured as the killer’s victims. Holbert’s sympathies seem to align with the quality of his prose: The land is rendered in loving, even exquisite detail, so too the crimes. The characters’ minds are infernal, and at its best the prose makes the darkness visible.
Holbert has gone all-in: This book is audacious. It reaches the heights and then keeps rising so far over the top one doesn’t know how to take it.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58243-806-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement...
The founding of Rome and the maturation of a hero who has greatness thrust upon him are the subjects of Virgil’s first-century (b.c.) epic, newly available in Princeton scholar Fagles’s energetic verse translation.
It succeeds Fagles’s critically acclaimed and very popular English-language renderings of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, the touchstones that preceded and inspired Virgil (the Latin poet’s hero Aeneas in fact makes a brief appearance in the Iliad). In 12 Books containing nearly 10,000 lines of unrhymed verse hexameters (i.e., six stresses per line), Virgil tells of the endangered voyages of Aeneas’s fleet of ships following the devastation of the Trojan War; his dalliance with Queen Dido of Carthage, and the abandonment of her that adds the scorned monarch’s lethal rage to that of (Aeneas’s nemesis) the offended goddess Juno; the hero’s journey to the underworld and reunion with the ghost of his father Anchises (one of classical literature’s imperishable scenes); and a litany of the deeds and sufferings of noble Romans that expands into a prophetic vision of a glorious future. Veteran scholar Bernard Knox’s replete introduction brilliantly summarizes the poem’s provenance, meanings and influence. And a “Translator’s Postscript” both emphasizes and illustrates “[Virgil’s] unequaled blend of grandeur and accessibility . . . of eloquence and action, heroics and humanity.” Fagles varies the hexameter pattern ingeniously, condensing to five stresses, or expanding to seven, depending on the desired rhetorical or emotional effect (e.g., “the dank night is sweeping down from the sky / and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep”)—and demonstrates his talents smashingly in scenes set in “The Kingdom of the Dead” (where, amid sulphurous sound and fury, we hear “. . . a crescendo of wailing, / ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share / of this sweet life, at its very threshold too”).
Homer’s deserved primacy makes us often forget that Virgil is in many ways his equal. Fagles’s triumphant new achievement makes us remember it.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03803-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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