Beautifully bitter Depression-era revenge melodrama in which good guys lose, good women die, and virtue's reward is unreasonable tragedy. More a retelling of Smith's fourth novel (Buffalo Nickel, 1989) than a sequel to it, the story here examines the misguided destiny of Wilbur Smythe, a fatherless man who becomes an amanuensis to David Copperfield, the oil-rich Kiowa Indian hero of Buffalo Nickel. Sensitive to abuses of trust and faith, Wilbur zealously protects Copperfield's business interests but is incapable of keeping Copperfield's femme fatale wife, Laura, from having affairs with Hollywood ne'er-do-wells. Wilbur survives an apparent boating accident that kills his own pregnant wife, Bobette, as well as Copperfield. He suspects foul play when Laura contests her dead husband's will with help from a new business partner, shifty Oklahoma land speculator Bill Kale. Wilbur knows Kale as a sneering swell who made Wilbur's mother his mistress while double-crossing Wilbur's drunken stepfather. Could Kale, who hates Indians, and his loathsome henchman John Bliss, be responsible for additional ``accidents'' that deprived other well- to-do Indians of their wealth? Without obtaining any proof of their culpability, Wilbur becomes morbidly obsessed with revenge. He gives himself a new name, Will Hunter, and persuades Kale, now living the good life in El Paso, to hire him as a secretary. He then romances Kale's ingenuous daughter, Sissy, who imagines herself eloping with her husband-to-be as Will uses her to entrap her father. Veering between despairing glimpses of empty prairies and gruesome south-of-the-border sex scenes, Smith pushes Faulkner's technique of ``portraying the heart in conflict with itself'' to gritty excess. Wilbur is a tormented victim and tortured victimizer, and it's his sense of decency that brings on the final catastrophe. A dark, festering, erotic, Jim Thompsonesque dead-ender that simmers into a brooding bildungsroman, reminiscent of Thomas McGuane's macho head-butting duels but without his loopy humor or wry insights.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87565-162-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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
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