A Doris Lessing-like chronicle—1970's-set, dense with detail- -about an upstate New York family with wounds too deep to heal without a tragedy. Lehman's second (Waterboys, 1989) captures the intransigence and generational confusion endemic to the 70's. Walter Gajewski—father of three (Carl, Cee, and Jason) and a ``lumbering self-satisfied hulk of a man''—doesn't live out the story here, but his children will manage to cause him and each other a good deal of grief in working out their destinies. The book, often enough literary in its encyclopedic presentation of its milieu, is also a high-toned soap opera. Carl squats with his wife and sick child Melissa, but Walter is hired to help evict him so that developers can build a resort at Quaspeck Lake. Meanwhile, sister Cee, a reader but also a dropout after a ``botched suicide,'' isn't sure at first about her sexual orientation (``There it was again, sex—the subject was never far from the surface''), but she discovers it soon enough with a vengeance: she's straight, and men are a drug. Jason, the third child, also has sexual-identity problems before going into hiding in the New York gay underground. All of this is worked out against a backdrop of Richard Nixon and Vietnam on the tube. Walter is voted Father- of-the-Year—an award that hardly reflects the true family situation—then gets knocked out at a lake demonstration, an event followed by a big finale replete with folksingers and cops. Eventually, the old man dies of pneumonia, while Cee is left to summarize what's left of the family. If this all sounds a bit hurried and cluttered, it is—but, even so, Lehman's confident orchestration of characters and incident finally makes for a literate page-turner that uses family melodrama to good effect.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1993
ISBN: 1-56279-036-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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