Bauer's second novel (after Dexterity, 1989) plays with two durable American themes: the national fondness for snake oil and self-made men. This engaging and episodic romp through the first half of the 20th-century is lighter, more accessible, and far more commercial than Bauer's lyrically intense debut. Born on the Texas frontier at the turn of the century, Luther Mathias witnesses his mother's fevered madness and death, only to be abandoned by his roustabout father at ten. Young Luther joins his uncle's traveling medicine show and proves a quick study. He's garrulous and charming, deriving his talent from his knowledge of the Bible and his uncle's highfalutin lingo. But at 13, Luther grows disillusioned with his uncle's scam. When he leaves the show at 17, Luther survives by his wits, eventually acquiring a mail- order medical degree and setting up practice in a Texas bordertown as a specialist in VD cures. All this changes when beautiful movie starlet Alyce Rae stumbles into town with a case of amnesia, soon followed by her vain husband, silent movie star Billy Boswell. The neurotic Billy provides Luther with his first experiment in a new specialty: cures for impotency. And when Billy summons Luther to Hollywood for a second treatment, a meeting with media magnate Haskell Albright leads to new opportunities. Luther—part Gatsby, part Citizen Cane—begins building his corn-pone empire based on the Bible, positive thinking, and healthy sex. A radio show and a clinic back in Texas allow Luther to build his tumbleweed Xanadu, all the time dreaming of his Daisy named Alyce. With Billy's tragic fall from studio grace and numerous business problems, Luther begins to see his world crumble. It's a classic tragedy of hubris, even though Luther seems to be headed off for new adventures at the end. An imaginative lark in the Doctorow vein (without the didacticism): rough-and-tumble fiction that exults in its inventiveness and seems written with an eye toward the big screen.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-09460-0
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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