like a series of short stories building in power as this life unfurls from front to back. (Author tour)
Instead of following his protagonist from cradle to grave, Wallace, in this clever follow-up to his well-received first novel,
Big Fish (1998), replays the life of an ordinary man who pretty much sleepwalked through his time on earth. Ray Williams is in Heaven. It’s not so much that he’s led an exemplary life, but just that he hasn’t done anything worse than occasionally cheating on his wife and accidentally running over a dog. But even in Heaven, at least the one created by Wallace, there are certain requirements, and it seems that one of the responsibilities of those who check in is to join a group. You know, one of those 12-step, touchy-feely groups where you discuss your problems, your shortcomings, your hopes, your dreams (well, okay, once you’ve reached Heaven the hopes and dreams part is pretty much moot). Somehow, leapfrogging an extensive waiting list, Ray finds himself in one of the more popular groups—Last Words—where folks sit around on metal folding chairs and discuss those final pearls of wisdom uttered just before shuffling off. Ray, who died early from cancer, just short of 50, has last words ("I wish") but unfortunately, as last words go, the group finds these ones pretty banal, and so he angrily stalks off, looking for another group to join. And while he searches, we’re treated to Ray’s life, in reverse, in a series of entertaining, sometimes moving, sometimes comic, sometimes sad flashbacks that eventually bring us back again to Heaven, where Ray, rejoining his group, offers a Rosebud-like answer to the meaning of his life. A deft and economical writer with a fine ear for dialogue, Wallace has produced a finely wrought novel that often reads
like a series of short stories building in power as this life unfurls from front to back. (Author tour)Pub Date: April 7, 2000
ISBN: 1-56512-260-7
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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