Though sometimes admiring rather than analytical, a thoroughly reliable portrait of a neglected novelist.
The life of a writer often celebrated by critics and admired by fellow novelists but who never achieved the popular acclaim and wealth he felt he deserved.
Dougherty (English/Loyola Univ. Maryland), who has published critical studies of Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) and James Wright, does his best to reconstruct the childhood of Elkin, though with only minimal success. As the author notes, virtually everyone who knew him then is gone, and Elkin himself, interested principally in narrative effect, told numerous versions of his experiences. Elkin had known since childhood that he wanted to write, and he excelled early. At the University of Illinois he met his wife, found encouraging teachers and eventually completed his doctorate in 1961—on Faulkner, one of his heroes. Dougherty shows us a testily loyal person. Elkin stayed married to the same woman, remained a professor at the same school—Washington University in St. Louis, though he had numerous visiting gigs elsewhere—stayed devoted to his early literary mentors and to his craft, continuing to labor on his fiction and essays until multiple sclerosis and a troubled heart finally felled him. Dougherty proceeds in traditional fashion. After mentioning each new major work, he pauses for summary and analysis, quotes from numerous reviews, cites the usually disappointing sales figures and examines the psychological effects on Elkin, who felt ever slighted despite winning prestigious honors (including two National Book Critics Circle Awards) and attracting a core of notable friends and admirers, including William H. Gass, Helen Vendler, Saul Bellow and Howard Nemerov. Elkin tried Hollywood continually, with little success.
Though sometimes admiring rather than analytical, a thoroughly reliable portrait of a neglected novelist.Pub Date: April 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-252-03508-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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