An unsettling and uneven blend of fact and fiction in a first novel about one family's involvement with John Wayne. Barden, a freelance writer, did in fact know Wayne: His father, a contractor, had done work on the actor's home. Barden weaves together a series of incidents in his fictionalized family life (including Wayne's attempts to help the family negotiate their misfortunes) with recollections of Wayne's private life. Among the confessional matters covered are Wayne's exuberant sexual appetite, his knowledge of his limitations as an actor, his dreadful insecurity in his decades-long relationship with director John Ford, and his increasing frustration with his (often suffocating) public persona. Apart from a pair of early scenes, one with his first girl, the other detailing an affair with Marlene Dietrich, the story focuses on the last decade in Wayne's life, when the fictionalized Frank Barden worked for him. Invited to Duke's Christmas party in 1971 after having renovated the actor's house, Frank gets drunk and verbally abuses his own wife, Lillian, who had been dancing with an old acquaintance while Frank himself watched Duke and his cronies play poker. The next morning, Duke, arriving to get the car he loaned to Frank the night before, presides over an effort at reconciliation, but Frank, still drunk and surly, refuses his help. Years later, Lillian visits son Danny in the hospital, where he's recovering from a painful operation; the two trade stories about Duke, who is, at that moment, lying in another hospital, close to death. It becomes clear that both the public image and the private man have had a complex influence on the lives and expectations of the Bardens. There are sharp, persuasive glimpses here of the reality of celebrity life and the agony of a family coming apart at the seams, but the novel remains an odd pastiche in which fiction and fact commingle without generating clarity or significant insights.
Pub Date: July 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48709-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed...
McEwan’s latest, both powerful and equisite, considers the making of a writer, the dangers and rewards of imagination, and the juncture between innocence and awareness, all set against the late afternoon of an England soon to disappear.
In the first, longest, and most compelling of four parts, McEwan (the Booker-winning Amsterdam, 1998) captures the inner lives of three characters in a moment in 1935: upper-class 13-year-old Briony Tallis; her 18-year-old sister, Cecilia; and Robbie Turner, son of the family’s charlady, whose Cambridge education has been subsidized by their father. Briony is a penetrating look at the nascent artist, vain and inspired, her imagination seizing on everything that comes her way to create stories, numinous but still childish. She witnesses an angry, erotic encounter between her sister and Robbie, sees an improper note, and later finds them hungrily coupling; misunderstanding all of it, when a visiting cousin is sexually assaulted, Briony falsely brings blame to bear on Robbie, setting the course for all their lives. A few years later, we see a wounded and feverish Robbie stumbling across the French countryside in retreat with the rest of the British forces at Dunkirk, while in London Briony and Cecilia, long estranged, have joined the regiment of nurses who treat broken men back from war. At 18, Briony understands and regrets her crime: it is the touchstone event of her life, and she yearns for atonement. Seeking out Cecilia, she inconclusively confronts her and a war-scarred Robbie. In an epilogue, we meet Briony a final time as a 77-year-old novelist facing oblivion, whose confessions reframe everything we’ve read.
With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed storytelling despite a conclusion that borrows from early postmodern narrative trickery. Masterful.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50395-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
This new blank verse translation of the first “Canticle” of Dante’s 14th-century masterpiece compares interestingly with some of the recent English versions by American poets, though it suffers particularly by comparison with Allen Mandelbaum’s graceful blank verse one. Its aim to provide “a clear, readable English version . . . that nevertheless retains some of the poetry of the original” is only imperfectly fulfilled, owing partly to moments of unimaginative informality (“In Germany, where people drink a lot”), though these are intermittently redeemed by simple sublimity (“Night now revealed to us the southern stars,/While bright Polaris dropped beneath the waves./It never rose again from ocean’s floor”). Translator Zappulla, an American Dante scholar and teacher, offers helpful historical and biographical information in an Introduction and exhaustive Notes following each of the poem’s 34 “Cantos.” Readers new to Dante may find his plainspoken version eminently satisfying; those who know the poem well may be disappointed by it.
Pub Date: April 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44280-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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