A coming-of-age novel that fails to delve beneath the surface.
An Italian teenager discovers sex, drugs, and decadence in Los Angeles.
In May 1992, while shooting a commercial in Rome, director Ettore gleefully tells his family they will be moving to Hollywood, “where it’s always summer,” so he can pursue his dream of making a horror movie. His daughter, Eugenia, is horrified, especially after she watches news footage of the Los Angeles riots; the reality, she soon discovers, is as dispiriting as she feared. In a city still reeking of fumes, the family settles into run-down Van Nuys, furnishing their house with yard-sale purchases; Eugenia is thrust into a huge high school where students are warned not to wear gang colors, and no one, including teachers, has ever met an Italian. Barzini (Sister Stop Breathing, 2012) skewers Hollywood pretensions and Southern California teen culture—vacuous, self-absorbed, insular—and conveys, in graphic detail, Eugenia’s strategy for dealing with her unhappiness: meaningless sex. Cloaked in a metaphorical “rubber suit” to ward off emotional involvement, she fills her life “with the presence of sex, as much as I could, as hard as I could,” easily seducing classmates and adding to her conquests a depressed goth screenwriter hired by her father. Barzini invents a cast of disturbingly odd characters: embittered, misanthropic Henry, who supplies Eugenia with drugs and is missing an ear; a volatile, alcoholic former rock star; a hippie drug dealer who offers scream therapy; Eugenia’s grandmother, who tongue-kisses her; two bored Valley girls who wind up abetting a murder; and many others. Eugenia idealizes Italy until a summer trip reveals a culture beset by misogyny, superstition, and violent cruelty. Back in California, she becomes enchanted by the canyons’ natural beauty, where she feels “something primal”; has sex with a mysterious girl who may be having an incestuous affair with her father; and takes more drugs. Finally, in a rushed climax, an earthquake shatters her father’s illusions about filmmaking and draws the dysfunctional family closer together.
A coming-of-age novel that fails to delve beneath the surface.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54227-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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