Beha gets to have it both ways: His novel is at once brisk and episodic while critiquing the limits of brisk, episodic...
A man desperate for cash makes a deal with the reality TV devil in this thoughtful, occasionally lecturing second novel from Harper’s deputy editor Beha (What Happened to Sophie Wilder, 2012, etc.).
Eddie is an erstwhile actor who’s given up on the occasional Law & Order gig to teach at the tony New York City Catholic boys school he attended. The job doesn’t pay enough to cover the in vitro fertilization treatments he and his wife, Susan, have signed on for, but a friend of a friend suggests a way to make some quick money: Sell the footage he recorded of himself with his ex-girlfriend Martha, now a red-hot actress. The sex tape boosts his bank account but botches everything else: Susan kicks him out of their apartment, he’s fired from the school, and the tabloids turn “Handsome Eddie” into an object of ridicule. Eddie is desperate to right himself morally and reconnect with Susan, especially since the IVF treatment worked, but he’s no longer in charge of his own story: A reality TV producer has made Susan the star of a show about her pregnancy, and Eddie can only enter the picture when the narrative is appropriate for his redemption. This is the stuff of comedy, but Beha gives it a sober-sided treatment; he’s concerned with the ways mass media hijack our sense of free will to the point where we only play-act at emotions and live vicariously through celebrities. That theme is old news, and Beha’s scenes about viral popularity and entertainment-TV news cycles are familiar and didactic. But the storytelling is ingenious. As Eddie becomes increasingly stage-managed to appear more “authentic,” Beha infuses the story with rich, potent irony, suggesting how susceptible we are to others’ plotting.
Beha gets to have it both ways: His novel is at once brisk and episodic while critiquing the limits of brisk, episodic narrative.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232246-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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