Frequently moving even as it charts the limitations of memory.
An aging man revisits his most meaningful relationships as he grapples with dementia.
Ramey's novel begins with a few lines of almost-illegible handwriting followed by a pair of sentences that set out the images that will recur throughout the book: “The handwriting didn’t look like his. Neither did the hand.” Protagonist Raymond sits in solitude, looking back over his life, from going off to fight in World War II to his relationships with the people closest to him. Complicating matters is Raymond’s mind, which is slipping into dementia. Ramey’s evocation of Raymond’s loss of language and fragmented mental state makes for some of the book’s most unsettling segments: “Though he couldn’t always call the numbers for the hour anymore or even the name for the—the moon...that is, the mano—the...first part of the day.” Later, Ramey illustrates his protagonist's distress more straightforwardly: “the sudden wonder that all his memories were just half-seen things and that words had become accidents he suffered.” Raymond’s is a life beset with heartache; in passing, Ramey reveals that his mother died in childbirth. His father, Vic, and son, David, both loom large in the proceedings, but most of his thoughts are occupied with his relationships with two women, Clara and Ellen—and his regrets over how he treated them both. “Raymond had fooled himself. Or lied, really. Told himself it was a thing a good man could do—hold two women separate like stones without hurting anybody.” The blend of fractured memories and long-held regrets doesn’t always come together neatly, but the book’s cyclical structure makes for an affecting conclusion.
Frequently moving even as it charts the limitations of memory.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-944388-72-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Fomite
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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