A nasty, arch and occasionally funny novel about cockroaches- -first fiction from Weiss, author of nonfiction books 100% American and The Great Divide (not reviewed). In an unnamed city (seems like New York), Ira Fishblatt, a bleeding-heart liberal Legal Aid lawyer, is rejected by his live-in lover, The Gypsy. This is much to the dismay of the other inhabitants of Ira's place: hundreds of cockroaches with names like Bismarck, Rosa Luxemburg, and Julia Child (they were born in bookshelves), who enjoyed The Gypsy's messiness and food-throwing. After a brief despondent period, Ira meets the overweight, matronly Ruth Grubstein. Cosseted into the role of good Jewish boy, Ira goes to such lengths to please Ruth that he renovates the kitchen, forcing the kibitzing circle of Blattelae Germanicae out of their homes. The roaches, led by their ringleader Numbers, who's also the book's narrator, swear vengeance. They disrupt a dinner party of Ira and Ruth and their neighbors, the Wainscotts, by causing a blackout that, in a good bit of screwball writing, forces Ira and Elizabeth Wainscott into close quarters in the dark. But Plan A fails, and thus begins Numbers's long journey of the soul to find a more effective revenge on humankind. What follows are comically gruesome scenes described from Numbers's roachy point of view: from toilets, in Ira and Ruth's bed, in the hair of a coke dealer named Rufus, in the sewer system. Weiss's broad ethnic comedy—in dialogue between Jewish Ira, black Rufus, and old-money racist Wainscott—is bracing at first, then flattens. A well-modulated comic novel (one hesitates to say ``picaresque''), only for those with really, really wicked sensibilities.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-85242-326-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poortimes—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everything away, and her death in a well; for Joe, the hand of the "wild" woman, his mother, that never really found his. And all of the child Dorcas's dolls burned up with her mother and her childhood. Truly, the new music of Harlem—from clicks and taps of pleasure to the thud of betrayed marching black veterans with their frozen faces—"had a complicated anger in it." Were Joe and Violet substitutes for each other, for a need known and unmet? At the close, a new link is forged between them with another Dorcas. One of Morrison's richest novels yet, with its weave of city voices, tough and tender, public and private, and a flight of images that sweep up the world in a heartbeat: the narrator (never identified) contemplates airships in a city sky as they "swim below cloud foam...like watching a private dream....That was what [Dorcas's] hunger was like: mesmerizing, directed, floating like a public secret." In all, a lovely novel—lyrical, searching, and touching.
Pub Date: April 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41167-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the Toronto-based Mistry (Such a Long Journey, 1991), a splendid tale of contemporary India that, in chronicling the sufferings of outcasts and innocents trying to survive in the ``State of Internal Emergency'' of the 1970s, grapples with the great question of how to live in the face of death and despair. Though Mistry is too fine a writer to indulge in polemics, this second novel is also a quietly passionate indictment of a corrupt and ineluctably cruel society. India under Indira Gandhi has become a country ruled by thugs who maim and kill for money and power. The four protagonists (all victims of the times) are: Dina, 40-ish, poor and widowed after only three years of marriage; Maneck, the son of an old school friend of Dina's; and two tailors, Ishvar and his nephew Om, members of the Untouchable caste. For a few months, this unlikely quartet share a tranquil happiness in a nameless city—a city of squalid streets teeming with beggars, where politicians, in the name of progress, abuse the poor and the powerless. Dina, whose dreams of attending college ended when her father died, is now trying to support herself with seamstress work; Maneck, a tenderhearted boy, has been sent to college because the family business is failing; and the two tailors find work with Dina. Though the four survive encounters with various thugs and are saved from disaster by a quirky character known as the Beggarmaster, the times are not propitious for happiness. On a visit back home, Om and Ishvar are forcibly sterilized; Maneck, devastated by the murder of an activist classmate, goes abroad. But Dina and the tailors, who have learned ``to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair,'' keep going. A sweeping story, in a thoroughly Indian setting, that combines Dickens's vivid sympathy for the poor with Solzhenitsyn's controlled outrage, celebrating both the resilience of the human spirit and the searing heartbreak of failed dreams.
Pub Date: April 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44608-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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