Learned, pretentious, politically correct, navel-gazing, tedious, wholly uninteresting fiction.
Ending its moratorium on new fiction, Dalkey seems to have made this selection on the basis of obligations from exhausted literary lore rather than anything of a new or living interest.
The narrator is a Montreal writer (like author Scott) who is spending a certain time in Paris, living in a studio apartment under the eye of a typically critical and snoopy concierge. Her friends are “Z,” “B,” “S,” “C,” “P,” and “H,” some male, some female, though it’s not easy to find out who’s which, nor is any of them given shading or depth enough to be memorable or seem more than a cipher. The narrator is ever-busy: lounging on her studio couch not writing (and feeling guilt); observing the changing window display in the men’s store across the way; sight-seeing (she’s encyclopedically knowledgeable about historic and literary Paris); stopping in cafés; or going to literary and movie-celebrity parties. But she’s no fun whatsoever to spend time with on the page, since she comes no more to life than do her alphabetical friends. That she’s lesbian becomes clear, but much clearer is that she’s got some weird idea about gerunds, seemingly derived from an idea Gertrude Stein had about predicates. Or whatever. In any case, this brings our narrator, over and over, to write things of this sort: “Like she doing. When visiting chez nous. Reinforcing sense I not at all in Paris I expecting.” Or to say things like “Feeling like weeks since I sleeping.” She can say careful, lovely, poetic things like “On the boulevard strip the ragged maples blow.” But much, much, much more often her remarks are such as “Suddenly I feeling in Paris I expecting.” She’s having, it seems, trouble selling her “Bk of Md’d Wm’n.” One very elegant publisher, over tea, suggests that the trouble has to do with the “American in charge of translation” and “Thinking narrative wanting.” But could it—gasp!—possibly be?
Learned, pretentious, politically correct, navel-gazing, tedious, wholly uninteresting fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-56478-297-2
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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
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