A courtroom drama, courtesy of the tireless civil libertarian and novelist, whose recent home runs include The Trial of Abigail Goodman (1993), about the anti-abortion movement; and An Independent Woman (1997), a sixth-volume wrap-up of the Immigrants series. Seventy-eight-year-old Ike Goldman, a retired Columbia University contract law professor, has been a widower for three years when he saves a 40ish woman from jumping off the George Washington Bridge, takes her home, lets her sleep over, treats her to a fairly fancy dinner the next night, and, despite all reason, quickly finds himself falling in love. As it happens, Elizabeth Hopper is the estranged wife of multimillionaire William Sedgwick Hopper, a Wall Street partner neck-deep in scandal. The story moves along sedately in Fast’s most relaxed style ever, with the author of Citizen Tom Paine and Freedom Road plainly enjoying and indulging himself in this smoked salmon of romantic fantasy, adding plot dollops to keep the reader alert. A depressed artist terrified of her husband, Elizabeth took a part-time job as a shoe clerk right after the annulment came through. She calls herself a battered woman who wants to help other battered women. But is this the whole truth? Within six weeks Ike wants to marry her, and she agrees to his proposal. But then, three days after her acceptance, detectives appear at Ike’s door with a search warrant: William Hopper has been shot to death, and Liz is jailed for the homicide. Subsequently, Ike spends $100,000 hiring a female criminal lawyer to defend his love, who has been indicted on essentially circumstantial evidence. The eponymous redemption will not result from anyone’s change in character, but rather from an event out of left field involving a previously unknown character. Readable, though far from stylish and not as gripping as some of our lawyer novelists. Still, Fast’s followers won—t be disappointed.
Pub Date: July 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100455-2
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
A first English translation of a 1989 Hungarian novel, in which the arrival of a traveling circus in a nondescript village arouses local curiosity, paranoia, and terror and ends in a kind of communal madness. Like the work of Austrian ur-pessimist Thomas Bernhard (which may have influenced it), Krasznahorkai’s darkly funny parable is presented in chapters of unbroken long paragraphs, and attains both a hurtling momentum and a pleasing complexity in the presentation of its passionately interconnected characters—the most memorable being the Valkyrie-like hausfrauen Mrs. Eszter and Mrs. Plauf, the former’s estranged husband (a music teacher who tries and fails to remain aloof from his neighbors’ fear of everything new and different), and the latter’s son Valuska, a young idealist whose “awakening” is gloomily foreordained. Not an easy read, but ingeniously composed and fascinating.
Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-7043-8009-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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