Another jolting, maddening, occasionally exhilarating trip on Calisher's Hovercraft fiction, as again the misty distance between the plot frame and the Meaning-of-It-All offers both dazzlements and headachy obscurations. The scene is a New Jersey town in the 50's and onward, on one of those streets "where the existence of, well, real life could not hope to be concealed," and where a young woman shapes her awakening psyche, as a playwright stirs a nest of family secrets. Craig Towle, the town's famous playwright, is the one who married the "bobby-soxer" half his age (who will later die poisoned by her unborn child). And the female narrator will also have been used by ToMe ("he married our age") as a voice for his creation—a play based on her family's exotic/erotic secrets; the play, never produced, will wither, stillborn. While Towle, the user and abuser, looms offstage, a tangle of family-folk knits and loosens ties, exchanges houses, poses puzzles. Mother, once Towle's lover, inherits money—from Father's mistress? Or had Father a different sexual proclivity? Brother Tim, who spent a boyhood with Grandmother Nessa, is on the periphery of the central mystery. This is rooted in Grandmother's dead sibling Leo—seen as a woman's face in a fading photograph. Artifacts in the present celebrate Leo: an image of two bikes side by side; a wedding dress, offered as a challenge to Nessa by Towle, as he prepares to discard it in a dump. It's Towle who will revive the story of Leo, the man/woman whose strength and tenderness obscured sexual divisions. And it is at her (aborted) wedding, to artist a graveyard, "at the double knot of my own legend." Convoluted and packed with some startling perceptions, as well as those lumpish throwaways ("Sandwiches make me optimistic"; or "What is sex but a question the body answers?"). Still, this lush mix of insights and fictional outtakes is more manageable and tighter than Calisher's previous novels. A wildly uneven talent—but un-ignorable.
Pub Date: March 28, 1986
ISBN: 0385184263
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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