Bottom-dog lyricism, good dialogue, grim as a gallows.
Spiegelman made news last fall with his New York Post series attacking Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers, largely accusing them of trendiness and greed. How does his own debut hold up against Heartbreaking and Shifty Wordslingers Franzen and Moody?
In Bayside, Queens, at 23, Leon Koch is learning to kick in his powers with drink and drugs—and down to the end of the night he goes. His buddies are Ortiz and Rahmer, who, at 16, built pipe bombs and blew up the home of a TMR—The Master Race, or The Mentally Retarded (“They were peasants, mouth-breathers, they didn’t wipe their asses. If you looked at their DNA, it was dogshit and Tic Tacs”)—got caught, and were sent away, Ortiz for a year, Rahmer for two (because of his parents’ death in a plane crash, Ortiz has a house and half-million dollars in trust). The story wanders nonlinearly between high-school days and Leon’s young manhood. When Leon falls for lesbian Dara, an S-M freak as well, their grisly sexplay turns on Dara’s need to have sex that ends like a symphony, with rockets and cannons being set off (“Everything has to be burning”). Meanwhile, Leon tries to help out Rahmer’s overly beautiful girlfriend Cali. He starts City University, gets weirdly involved in a huge demonstration in Union Square, where Dara incites the cops as pigs. Many chapters feel like druggy slapdash paste-ups—though maybe they’re an original choppy high-art form. Most amusing scene: when Leon and his new girlfriend Carrie try to get money for coke by selling his Star Wars Hans Solo handblaster, his storm trooper rifle from Empire, and his Luke Skywalker figurine with translucent blue-plastic light saber, but keep getting cheated on each item. Ortiz, at end, suicides, vomiting out the door of a moving car, then throwing his head under the back wheel. Leon afterward becomes mentally disordered and suicidal.
Bottom-dog lyricism, good dialogue, grim as a gallows.Pub Date: June 10, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6056-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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