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JOHNNY CRITELLI and THE KNIFEMEN

Name: JOHNNY CRITELLI and THE KNIFEMEN
Author: Frank Lentricchia
ISBN: 0-684-81408-0

by Frank Lentricchia ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1996

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A welcome advance over his messy and confessional Edge of Night (1994), these two novellas by the Duke literary theorist still bear the signs of someone who's spent much of his career thinking about fiction, not creating it. The first, self-reflexive story interweaves elements of the author's childhood with a mythic figure from the Utica, New York, of his youth. Johnny Critelli, orphaned when his mother was assaulted by a union-busting factory thug, grew up to become a union organizer. Nurtured on Shakespeare and anarchist politics, the outsized Critelli enters legend with a barroom stunt that we eventually learn was staged, an effort by Critelli to create his own myth. Meanwhile, the Lentricchia clan of hard-working Italian immigrants eventually produce Frank Junior, the author; among his recollections is the golden memory of a one-hitter he pitched in 1952. Which is better than his obsessional concerns as an adult: Sex and physical ailments. Lentricchia allows both his mother and his current girlfriend to talk, the first worried about what ``Mr. Exaggeration'' will have her say, the second a tough-minded Irishwoman who mocks Frank's inability to confront the familiar dead. Despite patches of postmod babble, this unconventional story/faux memoir builds into a fine poetic narrative. The second novella is more straightforward, but also aggressively disagreeable. At its center is the thrice-divorced ob-gyn, Dr. Richard Assisi, a brooding obsessive. An admitted ``cultured whiner,'' Assisi has never overcome his mother's early death, for which he blames his father. He falls under the spell of the sophisticated, creepy Victor Grazeidei, the owner of a Utica meatpacking plant, who introduces Richard to the slaughterhouse and his after-hours work as an abortionist, both of which are described in gruesome, poetic detail. Even at his most meta-level, Lentricchia aspires to Joycean riffs (with Utica his Dublin) on memory, desire, and the struggles of fathers and sons. Sometimes he succeeds.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-81408-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MANHATTAN MELTDOWN
by Frank Lentricchia

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DOG KILLER OF UTICA
by Frank Lentricchia

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOOK OF RUTH
by Frank Lentricchia

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.