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THE SECRET DEFECTOR

Name: THE SECRET DEFECTOR
Author: Clancy Sigal
ISBN: 0-06-019011-6

by Clancy Sigal ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 1992

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The return of the great social iconoclast, his fourth novel in a quarter of a century (Weekend in Dinlock, Going Away, Zone of the Interior), with the last bow of many earlier characters in his books. Like John Reed, Sigal is a renowned American Red, a kind of amusingly serious self-made writer-outcast-Don Juan with a two- fisted history of life among the down-and-out. Here, he tells about his earliest days as an apprentice writer lusting to break loose with his first book but immured in writer's block. The problem: as Gus Black, he's living with Rose O'Malley (read Doris Lessing), a novelist from South Africa now in London, nine years his senior, who is writing Loose Leaves from a Random Life (read The Golden Notebook, in which Sigal is Saul Green) with daily installments about their love affair and Rose's cannibalizing Gus's notes about that affair. Rose is a great cook (whom Gus often flops onto the kitchen floor for sex) but also a humorless Socialist with a genius for analyzing the Oedipal roots of every move Gus makes. After her book comes out, Gus complains that ``She didn't even get my orgasms right.'' At last they part and Gus goes to work for British Vogue as the resident Red, and as a wandering BBC-TV interviewer digging into the lower classes. He's sold out? For the moment. Real people, including Colin MacInnes and E.M. Forster, pop up for rich portraits, and in fact nearly the whole British writing Establishment gets tarred and feathered by Gus, whose idols are Hemingway and Mailer. Gus also goes in for LSD and treatment for ``schizophrenia'' with the messianic Marxist shrink Willie Last (from Zone of the Interior). Back in the States, he's an overpaid writer-in-residence at a California college but returns to England to save his Red soul. Sigal digs hard into union life and poverty in both countries, and his vigorous panning brings up many fine gold flakes among the gravel.

Pub Date: April 22, 1992

ISBN: 0-06-019011-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.