The families in Cookson's period novels shout a lot and are unhappy as only Cookson's families can be (The Obsession, p. 659, etc.) when they wrestle with the problems of class, backstreet affairs, and the leaking away of money through profligate sons. Here, in the late-19th-century environs of Newcastle, Samuel Fairbrother, a rough-hewn grandson of a cobbler and now a successful owner of shoe stores, looks ``beyond his station'' and buys a ``gentleman's residence'' in order to raise his eight children to better things. With the house comes the elegant butler Roger Maitland, who'll eventually teach them all a lesson about class and character. And yet Samuel makes an uneasy adjustment to his new circumstances, in spite of the elegant efforts of Maitland to smooth out some of those rough edges. Wife Alice, meanwhile, soon feeling neglected, is about to rebel, even to flirt with—of all people—the attractive Maitland; son Howard, liar and cheat, falls deep into gambling debt; the flighty Alicia has cast herself at a stable groom and is now pregnant; and Jessie is headed for a convent. But two sons are off to sea, one promising to take to studies, and then there's daughter Janet, a chip off the old tough block, Sam's anchor in domestic storms—and there are plenty: Sam takes a mistress, Alice leaves, and Howard the Horrid is up for murder. The last straw is the attraction between reliable Janet and none other than Maitland the butler, with passion stirring. Sam the ``upstart'' is enraged that Janet the ``lady'' would marry a ``servant.'' Again, Cookson characters are noisy and broad-brushed, in plots that are formulaic, but there's also that raw energy and those displays of that gutsy, yeoman slang of the last century, ``common as muck'' but gritty as an oatcake. A reliable Cookson production.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84315-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This is the sort of book that stirs one so deeply that it is almost impossible to attempt to convey the impression it leaves. It is the story of today's Exodus, of America's great trek, as the hordes of dispossessed tenant farmers from the dust bowl turn their hopes to the promised land of California's fertile valleys. The story of one family, with the "hangers-on" that the great heart of extreme poverty sometimes collects, but in that story is symbolized the saga of a movement in which society is before the bar. What an indictment of a system — what an indictment of want and poverty in the land of plenty! There is flash after flash of unforgettable pictures, sharply etched with that restraint and power of pen that singles Steinbeck out from all his contemporaries. There is anger here, but it is a deep and disciplined passion, of a man who speaks out of the mind and heart of his knowledge of a people. One feels in reading that so they must think and feel and speak and live. It is an unresolved picture, a record of history still in the making. Not a book for casual reading. Not a book for unregenerate conservative. But a book for everyone whose social conscience is astir — or who is willing to face facts about a segment of American life which is and which must be recognized. Steinbeck is coming into his own. A new and full length novel from his pen is news. Publishers backing with advertising, promotion aids, posters, etc. Sure to be one of the big books of the Spring. First edition limited to half of advance as of March 1st. One half of dealer's orders to be filled with firsts.
Pub Date: April 14, 1939
ISBN: 0143039431
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1939
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