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MARTIN BAUMAN;

Name: MARTIN BAUMAN;
Author: David Leavitt
ISBN: 0-395-90243-6

OR, A SURE THING

by David Leavitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2000

Nonetheless, the gossip value alone should make this Leavitt’s most popular book. It’s also his best since his early...

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What might almost have been Leavitt’s first novel is instead the presumably autobiographical stuff of his ambitious fifth: an alternately lighthearted and turgid chronicle of a young writer’s pursuit of love and fame in the New York literary world of the early 1980s.

Narrator Martin hooks us early on, with a detailed account of his worshipful acquaintance with his college writing teacher Stanley Flint, a snappish, mercurial martinet whose flamboyant persona and manifold eccentricities pretty clearly betoken legendary editor-writer Gordon Lish. Simulacra of other celebrities of the period (such as Edmund White, Tom Wolfe, and Jay McInerney) keep popping up in the chronological apologia (of sorts) that follows, in which Martin fills us in on his precocious youth, startling early success as a contributor to “the magazine” (the New Yorker, of course) of the moment, frustrating entry-level job with a rigorously uncommercial publisher (any of several guesses may be correct), and awkward efforts to “come out” with dignity, find the man of his dreams, and avoid contracting AIDS. It moves along smartly, thanks to Leavitt’s wry, lucid style and penchant for self-deprecating summary statement (“in the language of the human heart I remained . . . illiterate”). And Martin is on the whole an interesting character: both a well-meaning romantic (always on the lookout for “a sure thing”) and a hoarder of emotions who knows he’s been guilty of trivial and consequential acts of “cheating” and “betrayal” since early childhood. In fact, that duality keeps the novel teetering—uncertainly and, at times, disturbingly—between what feels like artful calculation and presumably candid revelations of “the longing of those who have been hated for what they are to be loved for [what] they have made.”

Nonetheless, the gossip value alone should make this Leavitt’s most popular book. It’s also his best since his early successes, Family Dancing (1984) and The Lost Language of Cranes (1986): a cri de coeur that’s intelligent, funny, and genuinely revealing.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-395-90243-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SHELTER IN PLACE
by David Leavitt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TWO HOTEL FRANCFORTS
by David Leavitt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE INDIAN CLERK
by David Leavitt

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.