An optimistic, intricately layered rewrite of The Aspern Papers, with grimy jazz clubs standing in wonderfully for James’s...
Chock-a-block with religious imagery, mystical epiphanies, rhapsodic lectures on music theory and splendid evocations of the tawdry-but-hip jazz milieu, this sixth novel from Fuller (News Values, 1996, etc.), a journalist who is now president of the Chicago Tribune Company, reconstructs the life of a brilliant but doomed black jazzman through the eyes and ears of his quixotic biographer.
A composite drawn from the best, and worst, of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, and Ornette Coleman, Fuller’s fictional tenor saxophonist Jackson Payne remains a musical enigma to Charles Quinlan, a white, middle-aged, recently divorced college professor on leave to write what he hopes will be the ultimate biography of an American jazz musician. Quinlan feels he knows Payne’s music well enough to hear honesty, despair, confusion, drug-induced euphoria, religious revelation, and lots of pain. But what of the man himself? Digging up Payne’s Army buddies, agents, sidemen, lovers, wives, and rivals, Quinlan predictably gains some insights, but they’re not enough to settle the disturbing ambiguities: Did Payne, born poor in Chicago, die of a drug overdose, or was he murdered by those he had betrayed? What relationship did a sexually abusive Baptist minister and a prison cabal of homosexual Muslims have on his bitter affairs with women and on his last-chance attempt to redeem his daughter from prostitution? Quinlan embarks on an awkward romance with Lasheen, the secretary of a private investigator he’d hired. A frustrated concert pianist who favors Bach over Basie, Lasheen can’t let Quinlan forget the subtle racism that taints his vision. Quinlan’s meandering interview transcripts and quirky notebook jottings end as an ironic metaphor for his endeavor: biographers will never know why artists do the things they do, but the truth-seeker’s journey offers enough even to make the failure worthwhile.
An optimistic, intricately layered rewrite of The Aspern Papers, with grimy jazz clubs standing in wonderfully for James’s sinking Venice.Pub Date: June 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40535-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country—with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first—and best—book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district—with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital—where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action—the mishaps of Eva—is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1988
ISBN: 0241951658
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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