Attention fans of Evelyn Waugh, Douglas Adams, or any other clever, subversive British comedic writer: Add Geoff Nicholson to your must-read list. In this absurdly hilarious shaggy dog tale about collectors and collecting, the wickedly funny author of The Food Chain (1993) follows the misadventures of Steve Geddes, an unsuccessful London writer. When his well-employed wife finally tires of supporting him and boots him out, Steve tries to make some sense of his life by relocating to the dreary northern town of Sheffield. There he embarks on the cynical project of writing a book about people who are obsessive collectors. After dealing with the obvious cases, like hoarders of jelly molds and sports cars, he soon becomes involved with more covert collectors: people who amass lovers, knowledge, jokes, strange sounds, even imaginary beer cans. At the same time he must contend with a destructive anti-collector who threatens to ruin all of his subjects' accumulations. Then there is the mysterious door-to-door saleswoman whose 18-volume Books of Power is the strangest encyclopedia anyone has ever seen—except, of course, for Steve's friend Jim, who sets out to memorize every bizarre entry, each one a scatological jumble of random observations. And what are we supposed to make of Steve's favorite obscure writer, Thornton McCain, about whom, despite his disgust for collectors, he soon finds himself obsessing? Flying along a wild lattice of coincidences, Nicholson takes the reader into improbably funny territory. Just when you think he's spun out of control with too many different characters and plots, he brings it all together for a ridiculously inventive conclusion. On the surface a darkly hysterical romp, upon closer inspection a sly meditation on obsession, possession, and, finally, creativity. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-87951-559-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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