Nicholson (Female Ruins, 2000, etc.), smart and mercilessly funny when skewering the myopic anxieties of the literary world...
A refreshing amusement about one Mike Smith, who impersonates a literary friend and ends up teaching creative writing at an insane asylum.
Nicholson’s is an engagingly fluent voice, by turns funny and smart, yet sometimes also distant from events, offering detached commentary when a direct grappling might satisfy. This time, in his 14th outing, things open promisingly as Mike Smith attends an ironic “book burning” party at the home of Dr. John Bentley, an Oxford don. Just after Smith submits Bentley’s volume of criticism to the flames, his friend Gregory Collins tosses the manuscript of his own first novel into the ashes. Smith, gifted with striking good looks, is contacted considerably later (the two friends parted ways after graduating) by Collins, who has a proposal: Smith will pose for the jacket photograph of Collins’s new novel and, in exchange, will get a break from his humdrum job selling pricey used books. Smith—now Collins in the world’s eyes—agrees, and, after a public reading, is invited to become writer-in-residence at the Kincaid Clinic, an all-purpose insane asylum presided over by Dr. James Kincaid. Here, he learns the “Kincaid Method,” a form of therapy designed to rid patients of the images rustling in their imaginations. One can quickly see the problems this might pose for creative writing. Yet the students’ writing is both voluminous and startlingly good—good enough to be published as an anthology edited by the original novelist, Gregory Collins. The volume is reviewed widely and well—until a review is submitted to a journal declaring the entire enterprise a fraud. Soon, the very authorship of the writings, as well as the authenticity of the editing, become dubious, and Nicholson’s tale concludes as the whole madhouse goes up in flames.
Nicholson (Female Ruins, 2000, etc.), smart and mercilessly funny when skewering the myopic anxieties of the literary world and those aspiring to join it, is less entertaining—because less persuasive—when retailing the antics and atmosphere of the Clinic.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-239-4
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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