Best suited for those with a high tolerance for whimsy and literary play.
An antic novel assembled from connected metafictional stories that stretch metaphors to their breaking points and beyond.
The 17 stories, several of which have been published earlier in one form or another, feature as their narrator a hapless antihero who shares a name with the author. This Christopher Boucher (only slightly to be confused with the author of Golden Delicious, 2016), a writer who lives in the fictional town of Coolidge, Massachusetts, has either been kicked out by his wife, Liz, or is on the point of being so. He encounters one odd situation after another, generally coping with them less than gracefully. In the title story, for example, a giant face floats through the sky following the narrator until his friend shoots it and stuffs it into an old storage unit. In “Call and Response,” Chris gets a job at a City Hall prayer switchboard, where he's assigned to zap the majority of the prayers that come in, prayers the size of a Volkswagen or a refrigerator, until they eventually threaten to physically crush him. Often, the stories morph words into physical objects. “The Language Zoo” imagines a place with “strange, slithering adjectives, followed by propositions hanging high in their cages or burrowing low in hollowed-out logs.” When a stampede begins, sentences like “I’m so sad and lonely” and “How do I live without love?” break free only to rear their heads in the white spaces of other stories in the volume. The novel's primary problem is that its chapters are all basically variations on a theme. Though the final chapter, “The Unloveables,” offers a bit of hope and a sense of closure, those that precede it are more or less interchangeable.
Best suited for those with a high tolerance for whimsy and literary play.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-757-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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