An anthology of 23 stories, essays, and poems—many original, some previously published—which dramatizes an intergenerational subject that's receiving a great deal of attention because of the so-called men's movement. Here, the father-son problem is approached from a variety of angles. All of the writers are men, and selections range from perennials like Donald Hall to newcomers. Hall is represented by both a poem (``My Son My Executioner'') and an affectionate sketch (``An Arc of Generations'') about a loving father and baseball. Most of these pieces, in fact, veer toward celebration and nostalgic elegy rather than bitterness or anger. Joseph McElroy's story, ``Night Soul,'' is, predictably, postmodernist—a Proustian evocation as a father stands besides his son's crib, bonding with his son. Dan Gerber's ``Last Words'' is a deathbed scene—again, little recrimination or Eugene O'Neill anguish, only sadness. In ``Notes for a Life Not My Own,'' by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a man imagines the texture of his still-living father's life, just as Wesley McNair's poem ``After My Stepfather's Death'' does the same in verse. The best stories, because they dramatize a more complex world, include Kent Nelson's ``The Middle of Nowhere,'' in which an adolescent son moves into a trailer with his womanizing father and finds himself attracted to his dad's latest live-in lover; William Kittredge's ``Three-Dollar Dogs,'' about a Montana narrator who comes to understand how bittersweet and complicated life can be when he witnesses his grandfather's decline in a home for the aged, even as the old man fabricates tales of derring-do; and Robert Olmstead's ``Into the Cat,'' a backwoods tale set in South Georgia. ``My father taught me the boundaries and burdens...,'' a Rick Bass character says; men would do well, after the literary polemic of Iron John, to turn to this evocative collection.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1368-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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