Fourteen years and three novels after Hearts, Wolitzer picks up precisely where she left off: widowed Linda Reismann, 27, is pulling into Los Angeles in her Mustang; Robin, her bratty adolescent stepdaughter, is asleep on the back seat. Skillfully interweaving a plot recap for those who missed the earlier volume, the author hurtles her characters through time into 1992. Rodney King and Reginald Denny are beaten, stores are destroyed by the riots, Clinton hits the campaign trail. The fact that Linda remains 27 and Robin 13 may startle some readers of the 1980 novel, but both characters are so genuine here that it scarcely matters. Wolitzer (who has also written several YA novels) captures the teenager brilliantly. Walking into a gourmet take-out shop for a snack, Robin finds only vegetable chips: ``They tasted a lot like regular potato chips, and the seltzer wasn't bad either. But what a rip-off.'' Passages such as this also indicate the major conflict that fuels the novel: the discrepancies between wealth and poverty, enchantment and delusion, for which LA's tinsel-town atmosphere provides the perfect setting. Deftly, quietly, characters milk each other emotionally and physically, yet amid it all some desperately and at times foolishly cling to love. Despite an onslaught of difficulties—everything from a car crash and a robbery/murder to a carefully engineered custody threat—Wolitzer guides readers at a slow, even pace, always allowing time for poetic description. Little asides that in some novels interfere with the pace here blend in seamlessly, for example, Linda's memory of a high school friend. Actions and reactions get sentimental at times, and a major plot development is tied up too easily, but the majority of readers will be too caught up in the characters' day-to-day frustrations and accomplishments for such nit-picking. (Literary Guild alternate selection; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: May 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-118007-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.
Latest installment of the long-running (since 1915, in fact) story anthology.
Helmed by a different editor each year (in 2018, it was Roxane Gay, and in 2017, Meg Wolitzer), the series now falls to fiction/memoir writer Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See, 2014, etc.) along with series editor Pitlor. A highlight is the opener, an assured work of post-apocalyptic fiction by young writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s full of surprises for something in such a convention-governed genre: The apocalypse in question is rather vaguely environmental, and it makes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go seem light and cheerful by contrast: “Jimmy was a shoelooker who cooked his head in a food zapper,” writes Adjei-Brenyah, each word carrying meaning in the mind of the 15-year-old narrator, who’s pretty clearly doomed. In Kathleen Alcott’s “Natural Light,” which follows, a young woman discovers a photograph of her mother in a “museum crowded with tourists.” Just what her mother is doing is something for the reader to wonder at, even as Alcott calmly goes on to reveal the fact that the mother is five years dead and the narrator lonely in the wake of a collapsed marriage, suggesting along the way that no one can ever really know another’s struggles; as the narrator’s father says of a secret enshrined in the image, “She never told you about that time in her life, and I believed that was her choice and her right.” In Nicole Krauss’ “Seeing Ershadi,” an Iranian movie actor means very different things to different dreamers, while Maria Reva’s lyrical “Letter of Apology” is a flawless distillation of life under totalitarianism that packs all the punch of a Kundera novel in the space of just a dozen-odd pages. If the collection has a theme, it might be mutual incomprehension, a theme ably worked by Weike Wang in her standout closing story, “Omakase,” centering on “one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.”
A fine celebration of the many guises a short story can take while still doing its essential work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-48424-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
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