"By the last decade of the twentieth century, America...had become accustomed to taking to its heart or its bosom...a particular band of adopted heroes...called dissidents." In her latest bemusement with fancies bred in the dazzlingly cerebrating heads of wryly antiheroic protagonists, and with a spider-web-light satiric voice, Calisher (Age, 1987; The Bobby-Soxer, 1986, etc.) here follows the arrival in America of a famous cinema director— his netting by and release from a "minor Balkan province" (presumably Albania). For 16 years, Paul Gonchev, born in Russia, educated in Japan, has produced "travelogues" in the "confined space" of a fierce small country where travel was a "sin." Then, scenting danger in a country thistled with it, Gonchev's wife, Vuksica—mother of teenaged Laura and bullboy son Klement—arranges to have Gonchev shanghaied ("exported" as he would later think of it) to America, hungry for famous dissidents. Unlikely guides take over: a brace of dissident-hunters; a Breslin-like Manhattan journalist; and Roko, the tiny Japanese woman who translates (Gonchev reserves his English). Back home, meanwhile, the family stirs: Laura arrives in the US bound for yuppiedom; brother-in-law Danilo and Vuksica will perform virtuoso rescues; and a mother shoots her son! All this while Gonchev absorbs the US (accompanied by lover Roko) in short takes: from the color of N.Y.C.'s harbor ("sadness or squid") to college students eating red meat ("recently on the haunch") to a quake in California, where a new friend is slowly devoured by earth-as-womb. Throughout the emigres' journey, Gonchev tosses off bomblets of perceptions, cinematic images giving off little heat but a sharp flickering light, with some incidental buffoonery. At the close, Gonchev, a happy American, will teach his students to forget the dream city of the emigre and "record wherever one is, while standing by the river of flux." A slow, packed, teeming fictional journey, but the becalmed- to-bucketing excursion through the fantasized emigre experience is worth a trip.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41574-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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