Still, even a stiff and fuming novel like this one serves as a reminder that artistic reputations have always been...
First-novelist Toynton casts a narrowed eye on the amoralities of the art market in this unsentimental but far-too-mechanical debut.
Belle Prokoff is the long-suffering widow of reckless genius Clay Madden (read Lee Krasner/Jackson Pollock), and as she declines into painfully arthritic old age, she knows all too well that any attention given to her own paintings probably masks (if barely) a museum's or gallery's or collector's real interest, which are the Madden paintings she still retains. Still another species of parasite crawls onto the scene when a schlocky biographer shows up looking for whatever scandalous gossip he can find about the old days to juice up his book. Lizzie, a young grad student pressed into service as Belle’s assistant/nurse out in the Hamptons, seems the only selfless soul in the vicinity—and yet behind even her creeps self-interest in the form of a frustrated painter boyfriend. He'd not only like to be inspired by the Madden house and studio, he also knows he might get into a tony gallery's group show if he can just locate the legendary Maddens secreted by Belle all these years.To the widow, of course, the Madden paintings are “her ghosts, her totems. Nobody will ever earn them as she has, no matter how many millions change hands.” Earn them, that is, as the wages of abuse, neglect, and the torpedoing of her own career. With so much villainy stuck in globs upon her palette, Toynton can’t help herself: using words like “lizard” and “corrupt,” she draws caricatures more than characters. A slyer, less direct, and more satirical touch was probably called for (think what Dawn Powell did with similar material in A Time to Be Born).
Still, even a stiff and fuming novel like this one serves as a reminder that artistic reputations have always been commodities traded on an exchange.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-883285-18-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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