Gaines’s fiction glistens. The rest of the book, a fault of its editors, does not.
An unfortunate mixed-genre collection of bad essays, competent short stories and an edited transcript of a dull conversation meant to honor the author of A Lesson Before Dying (1993).
The editors of this mess should have listened to Gaines when, as they inform us in their windy introduction, he said he was “not really enthusiastic” about the idea. But the editors wanted to pay him tribute (Gaines was retiring from the Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette), and they wanted to assemble pieces that had either not been published or had appeared in journals with limited circulation. The six essays appear, mostly, to be edited versions of talks Gaines gave about his books when they were initially released. The pieces have an informality about them—an appealing conversational tone. But they are very repetitive. He tells the same anecdotes about his Southern boyhood, his love of reading, his difficulties with his first novel, the influences of music—jazz, the blues, some classical pieces—his attempts to capture his characters’ voices. Each essay has its moments, but each is stitched together with the same pale threads. Among the five stories is a dazzler, “Mary Louise,” that describes the agony of epiphany as the eponymous protagonist realizes her girlhood dream has been just that. Two of the other tales (“Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit” and “My Grandpa and the Haint”) are also very good and show in colorful fashion the influences of Faulkner and the blues that Gaines discusses elsewhere (several times). “The Turtles,” a very early story, has principally biographical significance for those interested in Gaines’s development. The long interview (from 2002) that closes the volume is just plain embarrassing (for the editors). Gaines’s two interlocutors seem more interested in recording their own comments about writing and literature and influence than in highlighting the author’s. He confesses, for example, no knowledge or interest in rap and hip-hop; they discuss the subjects anyway.
Gaines’s fiction glistens. The rest of the book, a fault of its editors, does not.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4472-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
