Ex-con Martin (an essay collection, Committing Journalism, 1993) draws on more than 30 years behind bars to give us his first novel: a prison narrative so self-consciously hard-boiled that, but for a few nice details, it might have been written by Mother Teresa after a particularly rough day. We meet Bill Malone just as he's finishing a 14-year stint in the pen for marijuana trafficking. Malone is the silent type, not given to self-analysis or autobiography, and reveals very little of himself in the course of his tale. In prison he began to read philosophy, and now he seems to feel that a life of virtue is the greatest good: ``The metaphysical reasoning of Kant and Schopenhauer appealed to the outlaw in him. Today he felt that he could leave the outlaw life behind and live free. It was an exciting idea.'' But as soon as Malone steps outside—into the world at large—everything becomes more complicated. He finds a job as a dishwasher and falls happily in love, but then gets caught in the crossfire when a local mob war erupts. Malone tries to keep out of the battle, but when his lover's daughter is raped by one of the wiseguys he acts in the only way he knows how. ``It looked like fate was going to make him wash his hands before coming to dinner. Or make him die trying.'' By the close, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that all of the crooked paths are made straight and that Malone is truly a new man: the story's formula is tried and true, and most of the characters have ancestors in the pages of Chandler, Cain, or Zane Grey. Amiable to a fault: the narrator's poker-faced sincerity is closer to that of Horatio Alger than Jean Genet. Cheap uplift stands in the way of credibility.
Pub Date: June 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-393-03790-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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