It is evidently hard to have been Eggers, though few readers will be satisfied with this nugget of hard-won wisdom in return...
It isn’t—but it’s better than most novel-like objects created by our younger writers, and like them, this one is directly autobiographical, ironic, and self-referential, concluding with a tiny gesture of hope the author no doubt considers brave given the vicissitudes he’s retailed in prose.
It is a potpourri of young gestures: David Wallace’s intricate cataloguing of smart trivia; Rick Moody’s detached, incisive portraiture of white suburban America; Bret Ellis’s seen-it-all spiritual fatigue; and a dollop of Michael Chabon’s candy-coated, hope-flavored insight. After a relentless preface and introduction (in which readers are instructed they could profitably read only the first 109 pages, "a nice length, a nice novella sort of length"), Eggers duly produces his imagination’s ripe fruit: the death of both parents, by cancer, a month apart, when he was in his 20s. With younger brother Toph in tow, Eggers takes flight to San Francisco, moves about, discovers mild poverty, and tries out for MTV’s popular "The Real World." His unsuccessful interview, reprinted here, discloses a hard shell of pre-emptive irony, intended, no doubt, to deflect authentic emotions and qualify him for the show. (Eggers doesn’t believe in dignity or privacy, for starters.) He doesn’t make it, but his unsated desire to demonstrate his grief/rage/detachment leads him, with friends, to found Might magazine, which has a modestly successful run. Might’s staging of the death of Adam Rich (Nicholas from Eight Is Enough) is briefly amusing, but only Toph shares Eggers’s pleasure in mocking celebrities while appearing to valorize them, and as this self-approving account concludes, a frisbee game with the wise kid results in a pure moment of grace, curiously intertwined with a crucifixion-martyr motif, in which Eggers is the suffering truth-teller.
It is evidently hard to have been Eggers, though few readers will be satisfied with this nugget of hard-won wisdom in return for their investment of time and good will. (Author tour)Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86347-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Poet Derricotte offers this portrait of a black woman's frustrating experience with racial prejudice from both outside and within her own people, and her own ambivalence about the color of her skin. This volume is largely comprised of the journals that Derricotte kept when she lived for the first time in a mostly white community. The author, who is light-skinned enough to ``pass'' when she wants, recounts keeping her dark-skinned husband away from real-estate brokers so that she could be shown better homes in nicer neighborhoods. This process secured her a house in an affluent suburb of New York but led to so much self-loathing and examination of her own feelings about the darker-skinned members of her race that she suffered a deep depression and ultimately separated from her husband. She wrote The Black Notebooks, she notes in her introductory essay, not out of ``desire'' but to ``save [her] life.'' At her best, Derricotte is reminiscent of Nella Larsen, for whom ``passing'' was a primary topic, and Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebooks, which is also about avoiding breakdown through writing. Some pieces in the collection are less cohesive than others and are subsequently less impressive from an artistic standpoint than pieces with a strong overarching theme. Typical of the latter group are ``The Club,'' which concerns Derricotte's and her husband's sojourn in the white suburbs and the country club that they were never invited to join, and ``Diaries at an Artists' Colony,'' with its collection of reactions from fellow colonists to her revelation of her racial background. ``Blacks in the U.'' and ``Face to Face,'' on the other hand, are more disjointed, but their point is not lost: It's not easy to be a black person in either a racially divided country or a color-conscious black community. A very strong first prose offering on an always provocative subject. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04544-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
An extraordinary portrait of a remarkable Englishwoman, a musical era, and a time gone by. The many for whom Violet Gordon Woodhouse is not a household name should read this book. A child prodigy on the piano, Woodhouse did for early music in the first half of this century what Sir Neville Mariner has done for it in the last 20 years. A harpsichordist and clavichordist of prodigious abilities, she made the performance of early composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Scarlatti her personal musical mission. Which is not to suggest that Woodhouse was some nerdy stick-in-the-mud. She was, in fact, a woman so enchanting that she convinced her husband to marry her even though she made it clear they would never have children or, for that matter, sex. She also managed to get this lovestruck soul (whom she did also love, by the way) to agree not long after their marriage to allow three other men equally besotted with her to live with them. It was an arrangement that continued, except for an interruption occasioned by WW I, for the rest of their lives. Woodhouse was equally bewitching to the female sex, serving as the love interest of a number of women, the most notable of whom were the composer Ethel Smyth and the novelist Radclyffe Hall. In between these romantic interludes, Woodhouse made the first recordings of harpsichord music, played with such luminaries as the cellist Pablo Casals, hosted salons whose guests included Picasso, Ezra Pound, and the Sitwells, and snagged the family inheritance after the butler murdered two spinster sisters to whom her father had left his millions. Deftly written by Douglas-Home, Woodhouse's great-niece and a painter, this book has all the makings of a Masterpiece Theatre hit. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-86046-269-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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