A marvelous picaresque showing off the late Doig’s ready empathy for all kinds of people and his perennial gift for spinning...
Two long-distance bus trips give an 11-year-old new horizons and run a lively gamut through mid-20th-century American life.
Orphaned Donal Cameron is miserable about being sent off to Wisconsin in June 1951 to stay with a great-aunt he’s never met while his grandmother has surgery back in Gros Ventre, Montana, though the trip does give him a chance to exercise his overactive imagination with entirely fictional accounts of his antecedents and destination, which he recites to unwary fellow passengers. By the time the bus pulls into Manitowoc, Donal has collected a batch of new signatures and maxims for his cherished autograph book, received his first real kiss from a good-hearted waitress named Letty, and met her boyfriend, Harv, on his way back to jail, accompanied by a mean-spirited sheriff who will be troubling Donal again. Meanwhile, Doig has thoroughly engaged readers’ sympathies for his high-spirited yet vulnerable protagonist. Bossy Aunt Kate finds Donal an unbearable trial and quickly decides to send him back to Montana, which means to foster care. Fortunately, the boy has bonded with Kate’s other victim, her husband, Herman, who turns up on the bus with the welcome news that he intercepted her letter to the state authorities. The pair sets off for a summer of adventures, related with Doig’s customary brio. Jack Kerouac, a champion bronco buster, and a crew of rough-hewn but benevolent hobos are among those they meet on the road to the eponymous Wisdom, where Donal fast-talks them onto a haying crew. Enjoyable coincidences abound, and a leisurely storyline with plenty of twists gives the author ample room to display his knack for vivid thumbnail sketches and bravura descriptions elucidating the skills involved in all kinds of labor. The nasty sheriff gets his comeuppance, and Donal gets a chance to combine new opportunities with old bonds in a highly satisfying conclusion.
A marvelous picaresque showing off the late Doig’s ready empathy for all kinds of people and his perennial gift for spinning a great yarn. He will be missed.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-202-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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