Great Britain’s Catcher in the Rye—and another triumph for one of the present age’s most interesting and accomplished...
Adolescent angst during the Margaret Thatcher–inflected year of 1982 is the subject of two-time Booker nominee Mitchell’s lively (autobiographical?) fourth novel.
It contrasts strikingly with the matter, and manner, of the intricate “systems novels” (Ghostwritten, 2000; Number9Dream, 2001; Cloud Atlas, 2004) that made his reputation, if only in the racy anguished voice of its 13-year-old narrator Jason Taylor. Jason, who grows up in a sleepy, quaintly named eponymous Worcestershire village, suffers from a mortifying speech defect (he stammers), his older sister Julia’s stony condescension, his schoolmates’ casual malice and repeated outcroppings of inopportune “boners.” In short, he’s a kid—albeit, in Mitchell’s deft hands, an intriguingly sentient and thoughtful one. There are wonderful scenes of sexual near-discovery and boyish bravado set in the woods near Jason’s home (in the vicinity of the Malvern Hills immortalized in William Langland’s medieval poem “Piers Plowman”), which segue into more individual focus as we observe Jason’s healing encounter with a reclusive “old witch,” strained relations with his control-freak Dad (a harried supermarket manager) and weary Mum (who wants her independence) and an educative brief relationship with an aged bohemian (Madame Crommelnyck) who happens upon the poems Jason furtively writes (as “Eliot Bolivar”) and—in the grandest of manners—undertakes to educate him. The episodic narrative thus proceeds through numerous embarrassments and enlightenments, within the confusing contexts of the Falklands War (Great National Crusade, or chauvinist folly?), Black Swan Green’s communal plans to regulate the lives of its new gypsy population and Jason’s painful adjustment to his own emergent life and the fact that the stable family relationship that has always sheltered as well as smothered him is a thing equally capable of growth, change and confusion.
Great Britain’s Catcher in the Rye—and another triumph for one of the present age’s most interesting and accomplished novelists.Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6379-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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