All very true to life, in other words, with no car chases or explosions. Nothing much happens, but it does so with a...
A sprawling saga of the English suburbs, a sort of East Enders for north Londoners, that’s attracted more attention across the pond for the debut author’s age and the size of his U.S. advance than for its literary qualities.
That’s unfortunate, for 72-year-old Chadwick, who has knocked around the world and apparently draws much on his experiences here, has a quiet but assured way with a sentence. Tom Ripple, his protagonist and narrator, is a middling middle-ager when we meet him in the early 1970s; he works without satisfaction (“My job is to produce tables and charts showing trends in sales and the like”), lives with a wife with whom he shares a clenched-hair failure to communicate (“My wife does not play games, perhaps on principle. I’m not sure, I’ve never asked her”) and two children who can barely be stirred from the telly. His neighbors are strange but not overtly extraordinary (covertly, yes, to be sure), and everyone seems a bit baffled that the nation came out ahead in WWII and has got to its present state. Time passes. Tom has aged ten years, Margaret Thatcher is now in office, he’s out of the grip of his hated boss, out of his marriage and even further removed from his children, whose lives are taking contours he cannot understand. As his son inches out of the closet, Tom explains to himself that “sex, or whatever it’s called these days, isn’t everything”; just so, he scarcely recognizes London, now a world city full of strange sights and sounds. Things don’t get more comprehensible as another decade passes and the millennium approaches; Tom huffs and puffs his way uphill, literally and figuratively, acquires a wider and wiser view of things, and extends himself even as everyone else in his bewildering world finds more reason to pull up the carapace.
All very true to life, in other words, with no car chases or explosions. Nothing much happens, but it does so with a world-weary elegance, full of wintry discontent. Mature, knowing and very well done.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074286-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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