Imagine E.L. Doctorow (who makes an appearance in these pages) on psychedelic mushrooms.
Deconstructing the legacy of muckraker Upton Sinclair, this kaleidoscopic novel gives the Old Left a postmodern spin, with results that are frequently funny and occasionally exasperating.
Except for perhaps a musical comedy based on these pages, it’s hard to imagine a less likely cultural artifact than this madcap romp through the lives of Upton Sinclair, best remembered for The Jungle, yet sometimes confused in these pages with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt). Upton Sinclair died in 1968—just months after his 90th birthday, in a year that saw the class struggles to which he’d devoted his life and art take a New Left plunge into counter-culture chaos. Within the vivid imagination of Bachelder (Bear v. Shark, 2001), Sinclair never really dies—at least not for long. Instead, like the “Joe Hill” of the famous union anthem, he lives on within the movement whose ideals he had embodied. Yet Sinclair’s brand of socialist Utopianism has become as anachronistic as his finger-pointing, exclamation-pointed fiction, once highly celebrated, now consigned to oblivion (he in fact won the Pulitzer Prize for 1942’s long-forgotten Dragon’s Teeth). Slapstick farce combines with social satire as the impossibly prolific novelist, well past 100 and showing his age, continues to proselytize to diminishing effect. He keeps writing (A Moveable Jungle!, in response to outsourcing) and keeps dying, killed by assassins who become folk heroes for defending the American way of life. Amid the vast indifference of the public at large, he and his adversaries form a symbiotic relationship, each needing the other. Though the novel’s depiction of an impotent, intellectually bankrupt leftist movement in America might anger liberal sympathizers, Bachelder ultimately proves an equal-opportunity offender, capable of enraging those on both sides of the cultural divide. Ultimately, his comic vision sparks a comparatively serious inquiry into the nature, power and possibilities of art, in these times, in this country.
Imagine E.L. Doctorow (who makes an appearance in these pages) on psychedelic mushrooms.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-58234-636-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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