Stead has created a fascinating precursor to Bellow’s garrulous heroes and the little boy who takes on Wall Street in...
A sprawling character study that dissects a businessman working in Manhattan, bedding every woman he can, and talking incessantly, in this reissue of a 1948 work.
Ten years before Australia-born Stead (The Puzzleheaded Girl, 1967, etc.) published this New York–based business novel, she brought out the 800-page House of All Nations, which showed how a Paris bank touched many lives. This novel anatomizes a single character who does the same. Stead introduces cotton trader Robert Grant in May 1941 in a fur showroom, a sideline of his. There he meets the book’s other main character, a woman on her uppers named Barbara Kent, who will soon join Grant for one of his many trysts (the title is his euphemism for these compulsive quickies). They will remain stormily connected even when she entangles him as correspondent in a divorce. In this “life of bars, taxis, and bedrooms,” they and others converse in the slang-rich patois Hammett perfected and Hollywood borrowed in the Thin Man series. When he is not serially seducing, Grant looks after his interests on the Cotton Exchange, where he can make $30,000 daily, and in real estate, with some profiteering on a war barely glimpsed by this set. Fairly straight in business, Grant cheats, connives, reneges, and skimps in his dealings with lovers, friends, and relations. He ignores his wealthy wife in Boston and cajoles and mistreats his older son. He’s trying to get his life story told in a book or play, the source of much humor. And always in this perhaps overlong book there is his torrential talk, an oceanic spew that lies, bullies, justifies, wheedles, backtracks, and constantly reiterates pet phrases and idées fixes that suggest a mad salesman’s spiel. Callous, comical, loathsome, and tiresome, Grant also, as the David Malouf introduction notes, can sometimes stir sympathy thanks to Stead’s artistry.
Stead has created a fascinating precursor to Bellow’s garrulous heroes and the little boy who takes on Wall Street in Gaddis’ JR.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-925355-72-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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