A talented writer wrestles with demons, endeavoring to define and thus restrain—if not defeat—them.
From novelist Plante (The Age of Terror, 1999, etc.), an often-lyrical memoir of religion lost, sexual identity discovered, vocation found, and near-madness born of obsession.
This time out, Plante crafts a coming-of-age story that’s often surprising and illuminating, but sometimes conventional and even a tad dull. The author, who has Blackfoot ancestors, begins when he’s seven and afraid of the ghost of an Indian he imagines seeing in the neighborhood woods, and he ends with accounts of a close friend, novelist Mary Gordon, attempting to help him rediscover his Catholicism, and of his journeys to France in search of the burial records of some 17th-century Plantes. The boyhood portions are striking, none more so than the memory of a nun at school who appears to have an attraction for the young student. Helping him dress for a school play, she lightly touches the nape of his neck: “My body began to shake.” His body shakes later on, too, especially when, during a college year abroad, he hooks up with his first gay sex partner, a strange man named Öçi. The pair travel around Europe together, and much later Öçi dies of what seems to be AIDS. Plante eventually finds his permanent partner, a young Greek named Nikos, and then discovers that he is flirting with insanity as he tries to understand the images that haunt him. For a time, he records them in a journal at night, one image per page; after two years, he has 650 pages. What do they mean? Why do they keep him awake? Why does he write so obsessively that even Nikos has trouble getting his attention? Like several other memoirists, Plante assumes that substantial passages from his journals or commonplace books are interesting when often they aren’t. The final short passage, a French prayer once overheard, suggests that he has achieved a sort of epiphanic peace.
A talented writer wrestles with demons, endeavoring to define and thus restrain—if not defeat—them.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-7264-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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