By Denis Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1991
Poet and novelist Johnson (The Stars at Noon, 1986, etc.) further elaborates his disorienting vision of a cracked world in this unnerving and edgy novel—a very hip sort of postmodern Catholic fiction that keeps you off-balance with all its genre-blending and gender-bending. A Walker Percy-ish "knight of faith" pursues his paranoid quest-romance in the Provincetown of Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance. Far more spiritually corrupt and confused than any Percy character, however, Leonard English really seeks oblivion. A former medical-supplies salesman from Kansas, Lenny arrives on the tip of Cape Cod in the off-season to begin his part-time jobs as a graveyard D.J. and unlicensed p.i. A self-described nobody, for whom "nothing connects," this failed suicide roams the Cape, "wondering about Heaven all the time" and pondering the mystery of the Resurrection. In a local church, he glimpses the woman of his dreams—a raven-haired beauty who happens to be a lesbian and the subject of one of his desultory investigations. Lenny's work for the elderly Ray Sands, a retired cop, always makes him feel dirty. Sands's mysterious activities for a group called the "Truth Infantry" feed Lenny's worst fears, as does a bizarre late-night kidnapping that leaves him worse for wear. God-crazed and faced with Hell's random fury, Lenny becomes Leanna's bedmate, though her heterosexual experiment doesn't come to fruition until one particularly weird moment when Lenny admits his darkest secret: the autoerotic consequence of his suicide attempt by hanging. When their awkward love falters, and strange events accrue, Lenny's psychosis blooms; delusions of his incarnation mount. Lenny's Second Coming finds him a cross-dressing would-be assassin of a local bishop. And while the transvestism allows him to blend into the scenery, his gun-toting lands him in the slammer—where he finds peace eternal. Johnson's jagged dialogue, elliptical phrasing, and odd-ball metaphors all serve his cool metaphysical purposes—a tension-driven detective story in which the major mystery is: God or nothingness? Readers will be surprised by demented joy in this cosmically charged fiction that combines hard-boiled theology and a redeeming wit—the perfect spiritual tonics for tough times.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1991
ISBN: 374-24949-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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