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
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
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