A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.
A man and his wife, Americans, go to England to visit sites associated with the writer Thomas Hardy; while there, the man sees Hardy in an apparition: “Something I missed,” the phantom whispers.
The man, like the author of this novel, is named Floyd. Like the author, too, the character Floyd has a wife, a grown daughter, and a cognitive deficiency—the result of a virus that targeted his brain a few decades earlier. In his new book, Skloot (Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir, 2014, etc.) has tossed together a salad of fictionalized memoir, Hardy biography, and travelogue. Floyd takes off after the Hardy phantom. It turns out this isn’t Floyd’s first “Visitation” (his term); in the past, he’s been “Visited” by Freud, Bach, and Nabokov, among others. Somehow, though, this Visit is different, so Floyd sets up an impromptu investigation. What, exactly, is that “something” that Hardy missed? Something to do with his love life, surely. As Floyd and his wife, Beverly, visit Hardy’s home, birthplace, and other landmarks, they reflect on his tumultuous relationships, gossiping with local Hardy aficionados as they go. Gradually, the reason for Floyd’s ongoing Hardy obsession becomes clear: it turns out that he’s grieving the recent death of his mentor, a college professor who first turned him on to Hardy’s work and, at the same time, inspired Floyd to find his own voice as a writer. But there’s another facet to this search. As Skloot writes, “the chance to make sense of Hardy’s strangeness and struggle gave me a chance to make sense of my own. I was engaged in an ongoing process of learning to live as a brain-damaged man and resist neurological disintegration.” The unfortunate end result is at times sentimental, at other times tedious. The narrative is dragged down by the inclusion of not-entirely-crucial and ultimately uninteresting details: the photos Floyd and Beverly snap, the naps they take in the afternoons, and so on. The passages on Hardy’s life and work veer into blatant speculation, a shaky foundation that doesn’t support the conclusions Skloot draws.
A sporadically insightful, intermittently entertaining blend of memoir, literary history, and fabulist speculation.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31040-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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