Such narration carries this novel—and it’s a weighty, worthwhile load.
A long-suffering kid draws the bars of his own cage, in Woodrell’s tender and downright merciless seventh novel (after Tomato Red, 1998).
The author’s previous work reaped praise for its depiction of Ozark lowlifes, as well as for capturing the inadvertent beauty of redneck speech. These elements are present again, but having 13-year-old Shuggie Akins narrate quells the comedy and heightens the pathos. The boy is an unresourceful Huck Finn, including even the brutal father but without the option of hopping on a raft and skipping town. Father Red’s orneriness (“he had a variety of ugly tones to speak in and used them all at me on most days”) is intensified by his not being Shuggie’s real father; and when not off “scallybippin’” with his one obsequious crony, or roughing up the family, Red makes the boy break into bed-ridden people’s homes to steal dope. Woodrell’s sketches of invalids are windows into tiny realms of helplessness. But the weirdest and most affecting moments come when Red is out of town (which is often) and attention shifts to Shuggie’s relationship with his mother Glenda, who, skimpily dressed, steadily downs her rum-and-cola “tea.” As caretakers isolated in the middle of a graveyard, mother and son address each other in creepily unorthodox ways: she calls him “hon,” he calls her Glenda: “Living alongside the gathered dead of our town was a thing me and Glenda never did fear ’cause we never done them no dirt when they lived.” The actual plot—in which Glenda tempts the wrath of Red with an ill-chosen affair—has trouble generating interest beside the eerie revelations of character and the artfully artless language: “Except for the noise of the tractor it rode about the way I figured some horses might. Except also for the stink of the smoke and gas and the noise when the gears gnashed.”
Such narration carries this novel—and it’s a weighty, worthwhile load.Pub Date: May 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14751-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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