A thin, tinny autobiographical story from the Pakistani-born British screenwriter and novelist (The Black Album, 1995;Love in a Blue Time, 1997, etc.). It’s the first-person confession of Jay, an Anglo-Asian writer (in no way distinguished from Kureishi himself) living in London, on the eve of his abandonment of his longtime lover Susan and their two small sons. Jay analyzes well beyond the point of tedium his own conflicted emotions, and the comparatively blissful lives of his friends Victor (a happily divorced playboy) and Asif (a success at marriage and fatherhood). Jay pays mildly grudging tribute to the long-suffering Susan’s genuine capabilities, and contrasts his own faithlessness to his parents’ continuing mutual fidelity. He knows he’s to blame, and muses both candidly (“desiring other women kept me from the exposure and susceptibility of loving just the one”) and ironically (“Why can’t . . . [happily married people] be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?”) about his own character flaws, while indulging in occasional sexist rationalization (“Perhaps it is a fine idea to have women close but not too close”). Memories of his boyhood and brief glimpses of his life as a writer offer brief respite from the emotional wallow. But there obviously isn’t nearly enough material here for a book, and we feel Kureishi straining on virtually every page to make his turgid (even if brief) acts of self-analysis into one. The only pages that ring at all true are those in which, with effective understatement, he expresses sorrow for leaving his boys fatherless. There seems no real reason for this book to exist, and one hopes Kureishi, having dislodged it from his system, will get back to the business of real writing.
Pub Date: March 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85275-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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