“It’s a big world out there,” our narrator tells us. So it is, and while you wouldn’t want to live in this corner of it,...
Snowmobile chases, cigarettes and snub noses: Canadian novelist Davidson’s (The Fighter, 2007, etc.) latest is a down-and-dirty look at life on the quiet side of Niagara Falls.
Canadians are reserved, polite and law-abiding, non? Not so. Davidson opens as if with a country song, as Duncan Diggs is preparing to leave prison after 2,912 nights, of which “two were the longest: the first and the last.” Even if the prison is glad to see him gone, and even if he makes a halfhearted vow to get things right this time, Dunk can’t help but be a screw-up; he’s a jailbird now—“a distance had settled into his eyes,” our narrator says—and about the first thing he does is look for fresh trouble. He finds it. How could he not in a town where everyone’s high on bath salts or malt liquor, where the only growth industries are bare-knuckle boxing and petty crime? Dunk aims to improve his lot with a slightly better class of criminal, a reservation rat who runs counterfeit cigarettes from one side of the Niagara River to the other, grabbing at whatever other illicit opportunities present themselves. If Dunk is somewhat one-dimensional and elements of Davidson’s storyline are predictable—of course his childhood friend is going to be a cop, of course they’re both going to have their eye on the same woman, of course things aren’t going to end well—criminal mastermind Lemmy Drinkwater is a fully rounded hoot. It stands to reason, too, that any character named Bovine is a font of comic possibilities, if not ones for the squeamish. The story goes on a few beats too long, especially its protracted conclusion. Still, the icy chase scene that brings things to a head is worthy of Hitchcock, and Davidson’s writing is assured and nuanced even while giving tough-guy noir a good working over.
“It’s a big world out there,” our narrator tells us. So it is, and while you wouldn’t want to live in this corner of it, it’s well worth a visit.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-674-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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