Gilbert’s intelligence and verbal dexterity don’t count for much, unharnessed to theme or plot.
A meandering first novel tracks the experiences of participants in a drug story.
The two-week study, in August 1999, is seen through the eyes of narrator Billy Schine, a 28-year-old Harvard graduate with a problem: He owes sixty grand in student loan repayments, and Ragnar is hot on his trail in Manhattan. Billy has never met Ragnar, the collection agency guy, but he has lurid fantasies about him. It’s time to skip town, so feckless Billy abandons his live-in girlfriend Sally and his temp job as a word processor and heads upstate to the medical research center. There, along with other “normals” (healthy, allergy-free types), he will be tested for reactions to an anti-psychotic drug. But where is the novel headed? Will it be a medical thriller? There’s only a taste of that, at the end. Black comedy? There’s sophomoric kidding around, but that doesn’t qualify. How about Billy’s existential drama? He’s an outsider and underachiever, the product of parents who doted solely on each other; now his mother has Alzheimer’s and his father is arranging for them to die together on their wedding anniversary. Yet Billy remains a lightweight. When the study is over and he has the chance to be the subject of an off-the-books, potentially lethal experiment, Billy jumps at it. Why? He has no good answer. By default, then, this is a novel about some guys hanging out: swallowing their pills, giving their blood, swapping war stories of life on the guinea-pig circuit, and watching way too much television. For good measure, Gilbert (the collection Remote Feed, 1998) throws in a delusional roommate subdued by security; some unlikely animal rights activists; and a lone female patient, Gretchen, who makes full use of all the available men. Her mission statement, incidentally, makes more sense than anything Billy has to say for himself.
Gilbert’s intelligence and verbal dexterity don’t count for much, unharnessed to theme or plot.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-456-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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