A story of nowhere jobs in a plasticized über-Midwest with a good feel for where it wants to be, but little idea how to get...
An Upper Midwest state fair frames this lackadaisical tale of three misspent young lives.
Edward Steinke is certain, despite the evidence of his senses and his bank account, that he’s one of the last true professional salesmen in America, because he’s obsessively read and studied a tome from the 1950s, Classic Sales: Theory and Technique, by one Alfred Orditz. Seeking to put Orditz’s theories about “Perfect Execution” into practice, Ed and his ne’er-do-well younger brother Barry have taken a booth at a state fair in an unnamed state that sounds suspiciously like the author’s Wisconsin home. There, Ed, on his best days rigid and uncomfortable with other people, tries to use Orditz to sell fairgoers his product: a gloriously unsellable $1,400 piano organ. Barry knows how pointless this endeavor is, but as his life so far has been limited to playing in a horrible cover band and napping at his job as a paper distributor, he feels powerless to turn down his older brother’s request for help. As Ed fumes about the more successful barkers at the fair—who seem to be raking in the dollars despite their flagrant ignorance of Orditz—Barry tries to pick up teenage girls, the two of them bicker endlessly, and a convenience-store clerk named Leila wanders in and out of the narrative. At first, it seems that Leila, who appears to be too good for all the drudgery around her, will hold the rambling tale together. But this debut seems to have as little on its mind as any of its numb and clueless characters. Settings are wonderfully evoked, and Sernovitz’s deadpan Midwestern absurdity throws off comedic sparks here and there, but the story runs out of momentum well before its conclusion.
A story of nowhere jobs in a plasticized über-Midwest with a good feel for where it wants to be, but little idea how to get there.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6777-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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