A disappointing first novel from the Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright. Mamet traverses ground familiar to those who read his collection of autobiographical essays (The Cabin, 1992), which often celebrates a sense of place. Here the locale is a New England village near the French-Canadian border. Again the elements are known—hunting, smoking, beautiful women. Not surprisingly, despite the presence of female characters, the novel has a lean, masculine flavor as it follows the inhabitants of the village through a year in their unexceptional lives. Dickie, owner of the general store (complete with potbellied stove) that is the focal point of commerce, information, and fellowship, constantly doodles the figures of his mortgage payment as he slips slowly into bankruptcy; a woman attracts the attention and lust of married men as well as single ones; one man becomes a local celebrity after he fends off some would-be attackers in the woods; another delights in nothing more than the simple pleasure of sitting in the sun at an auction, his cigarettes in his pocket and his dark glasses on. Old loves are remembered: a mother by her son, a woman by her former boyfriend. Beneath the restrained surface of the town, however, there is brooding anger and violence. A wife is beaten and the police are summoned. Marriages go sour but continue in silence. Through the year, the village itself, following the unchanging rhythms of the seasons, emerges as the only real character of the book. The townspeople are interchangeable cardboard cut-outs, merely set decorations for the location. This is subdued, for Mamet. He seems to want the reader to read it as he hears it on his mind's painstakingly crafted stage. But good, sharp, realistic dialogue can't save what comes across essentially as a banal, masculine, low-key Peyton Place.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-54572-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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
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