For a fable, Wallace strikes a completely wrong tone, narrating his tale in short, ponderous, testimony-like recollections...
Heavy-handed fantasy set in the Deep South, from a hip young novelist (Ray in Reverse, 2000, etc.).
A young man trying to uncover the mysteries of his birth is one of the best premises in this business, and that’s what Wallace gives us. Thomas Rider knows he was born 18 years ago in the boondocks town of Ashland, Alabama (scene of Wallace’s debut, Big Fish, 1998), and he knows that his mother Lucy died bringing him into this world—but that’s about it. So, with the encouragement of his girlfriend Anna, he sets off for Ashland by himself to talk to the folks there and see what he can find out. His mother didn’t live in Ashland very long, apparently, and moved there only in order to look after a dilapidated house that her father had bought as an investment. Thomas talks to all the townsfolk who might have known Lucy (real-estate agent, innkeeper, village idiot, carpenter, etc.) and learns in short order that Ashland was (and is) a deeply strange place. Once famous as the “Watermelon Capital of the World,” it hasn’t had a watermelon crop since Lucy Rider died in childbirth. What does one have to do with the other? Apparently what assured the success of the town’s crops was an annual fertility rite in which the oldest male virgin in Ashland would be deflowered during a full moon in a watermelon patch. It seems that Lucy, when she moved to town, objected vehemently to this practice—and attempted to sabotage the rite by deflowering the chosen victim herself before the ceremony could take place. In the course of his inquiries, Thomas finds out who his father was, but that comes as something of an anticlimax, frankly, to learning the much weirder tale of his birthplace.
For a fable, Wallace strikes a completely wrong tone, narrating his tale in short, ponderous, testimony-like recollections by various townsfolk. The result: heavy, pompous, and dull.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-22138-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of...
A road trip in a snowstorm takes a sinister turn for a man and his girlfriend, the novel’s unnamed narrator.
Reid’s preternaturally creepy debut unfolds like a bad dream, the kind from which you desperately want to wake up yet also want to keep dreaming so you can see how everything fits together—or, rather, falls apart. The narrator, known only as the girlfriend, is driving with her beau, Jake, a scientist, to meet his parents at the family farm. The relationship is new, but, as the title implies, she’s already thinking of calling it quits. Jake is somewhat strange and fond of philosophizing, though the tendency to speak in the abstract is something that unites the pair. The weather outside turns nastier, and Reid intercuts the couple’s increasingly tense journey with short interstitial chapters that imply a crime has been committed, though the details are vague. Matters don’t improve when Jake and the narrator arrive at the farm, a hulking collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere. The meeting with her potential in-laws is as awkward as it is frightening, with Reid expertly needling the reader—and the narrator—into a state of near-blind panic with every footfall on a basement step. On the drive back, Jake makes a detour to an empty high school, which will take the couple to new heights of the terrifying and the bizarre.
Reid’s tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of intricately layered psychological torment so impenetrable it’s impossible to escape.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2692-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility(2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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