Agonizing, uncompromising southern gothic that glares unflinchingly at the cultural motifs of sin and salvation as they reassemble the shattered life of a burned-out Vietnam vet. Just when we thought there was nothing left to be said about clichÇd, late 1990s redemption sagas, Evans (The Blue Hour, 1994) delivers a bitter, cynical morality tale that both ridicules and praises the morbidly American urge for salvation. Vietnam vet Carter Clay is getting his life back together, attending AA meetings and working as a short-order cook at a Florida panhandle roadside restaurant, when he runs into his nemesis, Finis Pruitt, a homeless psychopath masquerading as a Vietnam vet. Pruitt, a biliously evil white-trash Iago, fears that the all-too-trusting Clay will wake up to Pruitt’s lies and expose him as a fraud. So Pruitt gets Clay drunk and persuades him to drive into the Florida wilderness, where Pruitt hopes to kill him. But Clay loses control of his van and hits Joe, Katherine, and teenaged Jersey Alitz, vacationers on their way home from a visit to Katherine’s widowed mother, M.B. Milhause. Horrified at what he’s done, Clay drives off, ditches Pruitt, and tries to elude his guilt, only to wind up at the local hospital, where he learns from M.B. that Joe Alitz is dead, Katherine has permanent brain damage, and Jersey is paralyzed from the waist down. Clay becomes so obsessed with what is, after all, a horrific accident, that he gets a job working as an aide in the clinic where Katherine is slowly recovering. He also joins the Christian church where M.B. takes Jersey and Katherine to be saved by the hypocritical Pastor Bitner and grows so close to the Alitz family that he begins to fantasize about marrying Katherine—until Pruitt wanders again into his life to make a final, harrowing attempt to destroy Clay and his adopted family. A masterful story of simple people trying to understand God’s inhumanity to man.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019265-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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