THE LAMENTS

Name: THE LAMENTS
Author: George Hagen
ISBN: 1-4000-6221-7

by George Hagen ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 22, 2004

Newcomer Hagen’s understanding of the mix of love, banality, humor, and sadness that are the features of family life is deep...

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The mid-century progress of a fragile but hugely likable family from colonial Africa to suburban New Jersey.

South Africans Howard and Julia Lament have the makings of a successful marriage. He’s a clever engineer, she a capable artist, and they both understand that it will be necessary to work to be better citizens of the world than Howard’s lumpen father or Julia’s oft-married mother Rose. Howard is willing to set aside his extravagant professional ambitions to work at boring jobs, and Julia bravely gives up painting so that they can be very good parents. But, when they do start the family, they are dealt a devilish hand. Politely agreeing to their obstetrician’s rather loopy proposal in hospital, they lend their beautiful robust baby son to a painfully lactating, loony mother whose premature baby is not ready to nurse. The unstable mum runs off with baby Lament, and both are killed in a car accident, leaving the Laments with the scrawny orphan, whom they adopt and name Will. They are fortunate. Although he of course doesn’t look like either parent, Will is quite as smart and imaginative, and, unlike his late biological mother, he sails on an even keel. Not that he doesn’t wonder a bit. As the Laments move first to southern Rhodesia and then to England, the family growing with the birth of twins Marcus and Julius, Will always finds himself something of an outsider both in the world and, inexplicably, in the family. The moves have been necessitated by Howard’s gentle downward professional spiral. Julia and Will hate leaving every place and find it hard to fit into new surroundings. Howard’s final move, when English employment doesn’t work out, is to America, where they settle into a trilevel in very white suburban New Jersey; there, they’re thrown even more curves and hard balls. How they cope, fall apart, and grow up is the meat of the story, and it is fine.

Newcomer Hagen’s understanding of the mix of love, banality, humor, and sadness that are the features of family life is deep and nearly flawless: a lovely book.

Pub Date: June 22, 2004

ISBN: 1-4000-6221-7

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.