Sardonic fun for the young and pierced. Exhausting for the aged and experienced.
The messy inner life of a thoroughly (but not murderously) disturbed postal employee is explored in the detail so loved by Richard Ford and J.D. Salinger.
What is it about upstate New York? Surely, somewhere there are happy people living lives better than the vision of Joyce Carol Oates? Yes? Maybe not. The latest lugubrious wacko upstater to self-destruct under the microscope of a wry, gifted, but terminally pessimistic writer (The Light of Falling Stars, 1997, etc.) is late-boomer Albert Lippincott, child of world-class dysfunction, Dad a minor Princeton scientist, Mom a nymphomaniacal would-be torch singer, Sis a future very minor actress willing to strut her naked stuff in front of the brother she knows to be hiding under the bed. Albert’s brilliant college career ended PDQ when, in the grip of an ecstatic understanding of the unifying theory of the universe, he attacked his excessively irritating, self-important, best-selling French physics professor and tried to bite his eyeball in the middle of a lecture. A brief stay in the loony bin led to gloomy romance and marriage with a psychiatric nurse and a job with the United States Postal Service (still just the P.O. at that time). It’s been pretty much downhill ever since, until, at the turn of the century, divorced, living alone except for the crazed housecats bequeathed by a late girlfriend, Albert has succumbed to the unforgivable temptation of opening and reading the mail on his route. (The first letter opened was to the odious Professeur Renault.) Sometimes he even answers the letters. But the latest purloined correspondence has made unusual problems. Ripped in the opening, a hand-decorated envelope has proven impossible to reproduce, and its failure to arrive may have resulted in the suicide of its intended recipient, an artist even more cheerless than Albert. And now, as the postal inspectors close in on him, Albert’s got this nasty lump growing on his chest.
Sardonic fun for the young and pierced. Exhausting for the aged and experienced.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05731-3
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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