An idiosyncratic mystery for the postmodern set.
Stuart (Call Him Mac, 2018, etc.) tells the story of a teenage girl at the center of a massive manhunt-turned–metafictional puzzle in this postmodern thriller.
High school junior Vivian Shortfield and her father, Stephan, were forced to move from suburban Baltimore to Cranston, Arizona, less than a year ago when Stephan became a state’s witness in a case involving financial crimes and murder. Now they have to leave again. “We have to get away from here,” Stephan tells Vivian. “We have to disappear and no one can know where we’ve gone.” Vivian just so happens to be writing a novel about disappearing…or rather, she’s writing a novel about a girl also named Vivian who is writing a book about disappearing. The family does just that—shortly after Vivian borrowed a book called How To Create a New Identity from the Cranston Library. Three months later, FBI agents arrive to question the librarian, Perry Ricketts, about her whereabouts. A lover of detective stories, Ricketts sets about trying to solve the case with Norman Nettles, Vivian’s former English teacher—who knew her not as Vivian Shortfield, but as Vivian Nau. As people dig into the lives of Vivian and her family members, they learn that the scope of the crimes in which they are involved or affected by becomes wider and weirder. As the Shortfields/Naus/Manchesters/MacLawns flee across the country attempting to craft new identities, their case becomes a source of increasing intrigue and frustration for her former neighbors, the FBI agents tasked with finding them, and the hit man/lawyer team that is also on their trail. How hard can it be to catch a family of three in an Airstream trailer? It turns out nothing is easy when the facts are constantly changing. Stuart’s conundrum of a novel is told in deceptively simple prose, though the dialogue is far from naturalistic: “Disappear? That’s exactly right Daddy. I told you about my book. I’m going to disappear into the air like the air itself. Do you know why you can’t see air? No, well, let me tell you why.” This helps to create an atmosphere in which nothing seems completely realistic and therefore anything is possible, and Stuart certainly manages to keep readers guessing. A downside of the author’s method, however, is that the characters feel less like real people than puppets in a stage show (or, perhaps by design, characters in a character’s novel). This makes it difficult to invest much emotion in their ultimate fate, which lessens the stakes quite a bit. Like some of Calvino’s or Pynchon’s novels, the resolution is less the point than the ever evolving premise, and the book will strike many as self-indulgent long before they get to the innermost Russian doll. Even so, Stuart has created a distinctive, unusual thriller that will likely rub a certain sort of reader in the exact right way.
An idiosyncratic mystery for the postmodern set.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9863441-6-9
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Gleason & Wall Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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