Sullivan (The Dead Magician, not reviewed) has produced a third novel that delves deeply and obsessively into the nature of obsession itself: obsession with a person, with sex, with, beneath it all, the self. Paul Avery has committed a murder, and he painstakingly re- creates the tormented life that led up to his deed. He recounts a string of destructive relationships: a devastating and forever echoing affair with an older, married woman at age 14; a rawly abusive—sexually and emotionally—relationship with a cousin; and, finally, as an adult psychologist, a doomed liaison with a patient. Each is luridly detailed and analyzed from all possible angles. Very little happens, plotwise; this book does not read like the bare-bones outline for a movie. It's immensely literate and thoughtful, wonderful yet painful to read, trapping us as it does in a mind determined to leave no stone unturned—and each stone, overturned, reveals a swarm of psychologically slimy things. Paul recites and dismisses a litany of theories on the nature of romantic love: Freudian, Jungian, behaviorist, transmigratory (which, he points out, ``begs the question of the origin of love, since it merely transports it backward in time ad infinitum''). Although he constantly strives to fit himself and his lovers into psychological boxes, to label them and thus understand them, he knows on a deeper level ``how deficient models are at capturing the true feeling of dry, leeched fevered desire wanting with every pore to touch, with every fiber to embrace, eyes blinded by inner images, thoughts sealed off by love, lips cracked with longing, yearning, pleading for that other to be here, to stay, never never to leave.'' A fascinatingly claustrophobic book, spent entirely inside the narrator's twisted, relentlessly analytical, self-condemning mind. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-88064-158-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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