A lean and angry work, anchored by a mellowing sense of self-discovery.
Pekar digs deep into his childhood to find the roots of his desperate fear of failure.
Anyone who’s read even a few pages of Pekar’s voluminous ongoing graphic biography, American Splendor, knows that they’re not dealing with a happy man. What they might be a little taken aback to learn, after reading this book, is just how exceptionally angry he is. This is a guy who grew up using his fists almost as often as his tirade-prone mouth. Given a bright, dramatic graphic treatment by Haspiel, this depicts Pekar growing up after World War II in Mount Pleasant, a Jewish and Italian Cleveland neighborhood that was becoming predominantly African-American. Pekar, just about the only white kid on the street, routinely gets into street fights. By the time he gets to high school, far from developing a sensitive artistic temperament, all he wants is to be a fighter, and he goes out of his way looking for guys to wallop. At the same time, his crippling insecurities start to take hold, and he begins to sabotage himself time and again, all to avoid failure. Once out in the working world, he keeps screwing around and acting the clown, behavior that could come as a surprise to those familiar only with his more dour later work (Pekar, it seems, wasn’t always a grumpy old man). Eventually, the more familiar elements of his life are brought together: the brief flirtation with beatnik hipsterdom, the series of dead-end jobs, the continual, torturous worry about money and respect. It’s all handled with Pekar’s usual self-mocking, breezy forthrightness, as though he’s got no time to mess around by playing nice. One frame shows him peering anxiously into his mailbox, wondering, “Boy, I’d a thought someone would’ve written me a letter about my new book by now.”
A lean and angry work, anchored by a mellowing sense of self-discovery.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-4012-0399-X
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Vertigo/DC Comics
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose...
Sparks (The Longest Ride, 2013, etc.) serves up another heaping helping of sentimental Southern bodice-rippage.
Gone are the blondes of yore, but otherwise the Sparks-ian formula is the same: a decent fellow from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches falls in love with a decent girl from a good family who’s gone through some rough patches—and is still suffering the consequences. The guy is innately intelligent but too quick to throw a punch, the girl beautiful and scary smart. If you hold a fatalistic worldview, then you’ll know that a love between them can end only in tears. If you hold a Sparks-ian one, then true love will prevail, though not without a fight. Voilà: plug in the character names, and off the story goes. In this case, Colin Hancock is the misunderstood lad who’s decided to reform his hard-knuckle ways but just can’t keep himself from connecting fist to face from time to time. Maria Sanchez is the dedicated lawyer in harm’s way—and not just because her boss is a masher. Simple enough. All Colin has to do is punch the partner’s lights out: “The sexual harassment was bad enough, but Ken was a bully as well, and Colin knew from his own experience that people like that didn’t stop abusing their power unless someone made them. Or put the fear of God into them.” No? No, because bound up in Maria’s story, wrinkled with the doings of an equally comely sister, there’s a stalker and a closet full of skeletons. Add Colin’s back story, and there’s a perfect couple in need of constant therapy, as well as a menacing cop. Get Colin and Maria to smooching, and the plot thickens as the storylines entangle. Forget about love—can they survive the evil that awaits them out in the kudzu-choked woods?
More of the same: Sparks has his recipe, and not a bit of it is missing here. It’s the literary equivalent of high fructose corn syrup, stickily sweet but irresistible.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2061-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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