A surfeit of elitist sensitivity undermines the novel’s genuine intelligence and sensory delights.
At the center of Winthrop’s latest (Fireworks, 2006), which concerns a Manhattan family in crisis, is an abnormally sensitive, artistic and bright 11-year-old girl who has not spoken a word in nine months.
Isabelle’s parents, Wilson and Ruth, are at their wits’ end as the month of December begins. The psychologists to whom they’ve sent their daughter Isabelle have not been able to diagnose the cause of her silence. Wilson and Ruth spend their days, whether in their spacious city apartment or cozy weekend cottage, obsessed with Isabelle’s condition. Ruth, who feels she’s failed as a mother, has closed her law practice to care for Isabelle, while Wilson, an unusually devoted husband and father, displays the kind of patience found only in fiction. Despite small quirks the two are almost too perfect to generate empathy, but they are believably distraught when the principal of Isabelle’s private school, which she has not physically attended since she stopped talking the previous February, decrees that Isabelle must return. Ruth fixates on Isabelle’s art as the key to curing her while Wilson obsesses about a family trip to Africa. Meanwhile, Isabelle draws with precocious talent, secretly learns to play Beethoven on the piano and observes her parents with a mixture of anger and love. Isabelle’s relationship to speech is like an anorexic’s toward food—and actually food looms large in her unspoken yearnings. As Christmas approaches, tensions in the household mount. Isabelle’s beloved dog is diagnosed with cancer. Ruth shows Isabelle’s drawings to her shrink without permission. Ruth’s problematic, possibly schizophrenic brother visits. After the careful, delicately calibrated accretion of detail about Isabelle and her parents, the ending feels disappointingly manufactured and a bit sentimental. Winthrop, who grew up in New York before attending Harvard, where she graduated in 2001, displays an intimate, sometimes excruciatingly obsessive understanding of Isabelle’s privileged Manhattan upbringing.
A surfeit of elitist sensitivity undermines the novel’s genuine intelligence and sensory delights.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26830-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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