Crane's ``double life,'' says Benfey (Emily Dickinson, 1986), was comprised of the one he projected in his fiction and the actual life that was influenced by it. According to Benfey, Crane ``lived his life backwards.'' Taciturn, mercurial, rootless, Crane—who died from tuberculosis at age 28—left little but his amazing work as a record of his life: novels, poetry, short stories, and journalism, which is how he earned a living. The two major examples of his ``backwards'' life are Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, written before Crane had had any experience of women and before he met Cora Taylor, the Florida madam who was to become his common-law wife, and The Red Badge of Courage, written before Crane had had any experience of war. Benfey offers other interesting theses: That Crane—since he learned to read when his father died and to write when his mother died—associated language and mourning. That the visual quality of Crane's writing was influenced by the bohemian art students and illustrators he lived among in New York. That the appearance of his poetry is a reflection of the Arts and Crafts movement. And that the meaning of the ``baby sketches'' (``An Ominous Baby,'' ``A Great Mistake,'' and ``A Dark Brown Dog'')- -bizarre takes on infant adventure—may be explained by D.W. Winnicott's theories of ``transitional objects'' and reflect the emotional deprivation of Crane's youth as the last of 14 children in an austere and pious household. Unpretentious and lucid but—like Crane's fiction and, as Benfey claims, his life—episodic, a series of aperáus focusing on different aspects of the life and work. A more coherent story may not be possible. (Twenty-six illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-56848-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.
Jance offers that rare—and welcome—hybrid: the suspense novel with heart.
Jonathan Southard is one of those unhappy men whose unrequited love affair with life has caused a volatile, long-term, internal simmering. One day the mixture explodes, resulting in a crime that is both horrific and, in a sense at least, foreseeable. He shoots his wife, her dog and their two young children, construing this last as an act of mercy inasmuch as it will spare them an aftermath of humiliation and shame. Having wiped out his San Diego family, he sets off for Tucson and the home of his mother, planning to clean the slate. He’s always hated Abby Tennant, attributing to her voluminous maternal shortcomings, of which she is largely innocent. With less difficulty than Southard expected, the bodies are discovered, clues are put together, identities established and soon enough the manhunt is on, participated in by multiple police forces from several states. Among these are the elite Shadow Wolves, Indians who patrol reservation land near the Mexican border. Enter Dan Pardeey. Half Anglo, half Apache, he has a special connection to the small survivor of another of Southard’s monstrous crimes. Angelina Enos, age four, has remained alive only by virtue of being tiny enough to escape notice. Eerily, this parallels Pardee’s own long-ago experience, and when she reaches out to him he has no choice but to respond. Because he does, his life is irrevocably changed and, in a kind of chain reaction, so are the lives of a variety of other players, one way or another, for good or ill, in Jance’s absorbing cast.
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-123924-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
Clear directions, but don’t try the rope trick at home.
A gay cop is found hanged. Was it suicide, murder, or kinky sex gone wrong? Street-smart Minneapolis police detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska, back on the beat after Ashes to Ashes (1999), learn a lot about autoerotic asphyxiation while trying to crack the case.
Sam and Nikki remain tough but likable protagonists as they investigate a long list of possible suspects: the victim’s alcoholic father, a partially paralyzed cop; a jealous older brother with a taste for violence; a mysterious blond socialite of amazing strength; a hero cop turned crime-show host; and so on. But the detectives also view a home video unwittingly left to posterity by a hapless devotee of self-stimulation through suffocation that suggests the possibility of accidental death. (The author points out, somewhat in the style of a public-service announcement, that many teenage suicides by hanging may well be experimentation of this kind gone tragically wrong.) Unlike the sadistic sexual practices on display in Ashes to Ashes, this particular perversion is more pathetic than titillating, although Hoag tries hard to crank up the suspense. Energetic, down-to-earth prose and realistically gritty dialogue help push the workmanlike plot to its complex conclusion, but a notepad and pencil may come in handy to remember who shot whom, when, and why. Unfortunately, the author has chosen to write about a milieu with which she is clearly unfamiliar: urban gay life (here, exclusively male). Not wanting to offend or get too far into the seamier side of gay culture, Hoag settles for bland political correctness and a balanced ratio of 50 percent good gay guys to 50 percent bad gay guys. In dramatic terms, they cancel each other out, and none of them is particularly believable. For all the double-crosses, dire threats, and crashing around with guns, the story just isn’t thrilling or chilling. But it does move—and fast.
Clear directions, but don’t try the rope trick at home.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10634-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
