This is the fifth and last installment of Doris Lessing's Bildungsroman—Children of Violence—which began with Martha Quest, published in England in 1952. Twice as voluminous (more than 600 pages) and much more overwhelming than any novel in the series, it will reveal changes in Miss Lessing, Martha, and the world which now outdistances our time and crosses into the next century after The Catastrophe. When last seen before leaving Africa, Martha was a combative young woman with a strong masculine mind and female instinct—the latter only apparent here at the very outset since sexuality becomes a very ancillary concern. So too for the most part do the political events and ideas and stances (Communism) with which Martha was involved. Now as the book opens in London, she is totally unaffiliated, wanting no liens and having no belongings beyond a suitcase. Temporarily she goes to live with Mark Coldridge, whose wife is in a mental hospital, and help him with his writing and his messy, muddled household which expands continuously (relatives, children of relatives, mental patients, etc.) Lynda, Mark's wife, comes back from the hospital to live in the converted basement with another disturbed woman and hold seances. Martha herself has one period of dangerous instability when threatened with the visit-visitation of her own mother. As time goes on, she identifies more and more with Lynda and the failure of drugs, psychiatrists, shock treatment—a failure which is a lack of awareness of some sort of inner life unknown to science. Miss Lessing, always a protester, seems to be inveighing once again against entrapment—whether political or social or psychiatric, opting for freedom which ultimately she and Lynda (with their special extrasensory powers) find at the close on a nameless island. Certainly much less of a direct documentary than the earlier books, at times ambiguous and confusing. But it does have the self-propelled continuity of The Golden Notebook, a kind of flaying, furious, obsessive momentum which should assure much of the same audience.
Pub Date: May 16, 1969
ISBN: 0060976675
Page Count: 674
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1969
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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