Six stories and a novella make up this plainspoken collection, Clark's fourth (What the Moon Said, 1983, etc.), featuring characters dwelling in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. More particularly, the vulgarity of men, and their class resentments, figure into these often unclear narratives. The first two stories, ``Advance Creek'' and ``Two-Tone Blue,'' concern Margot Weaver, who, at 15, insists on accompanying her disabled dad when he goes fishing late at night. She ends up being raped by another fishermen. Years later, Margot heads back to Michigan after growing fed up with her aspiring writer husband in Rhode Island; her sister greets her with her own sad tale of love lost. Two other pieces focus on sex and angst: In ``The Sprawl of Things,'' a horny, working-class college kid is seduced by a more sexually sophisticated (upper-class) girl. In ``Cow Love,'' a 17- year-old farm boy is set up for his first sex by his older brother, but gets some solid advice about women from his widowed dad—wear rubbers and do no harm. A jogging vegetarian in ``Necessary Deaths'' rues the roadkill he finds on his early morning runs. ``All the Way Home,'' a lengthy novella, is narrated by an obsessive, insecure writer teaching at a small college in Rhode Island. While he claims that his story is meant to be a paean to his best friend and colleague (the narrator of ``Necessary Deaths''), who is suffering at an early age from Alzheimer's, the tale comes across as something far less pleasant. His ill friend attempts to talk the writer into helping him commit suicide. The writer beds the dying man's wife, but argues that despite this the friendship is still intact. For all its efforts at legend-making, the narrator's portrait proves both men to be dishonest and manipulative. The tough-guy stuff is artless and vulgar, not demotic; the clumsy quotations from Hemingway and others only highlight the strained writing and the naturalistic pretensions on display.
Pub Date: April 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-888105-18-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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