In Dickey's first novel since Deliverance (1970), Frank Cahill, who owns and runs a public swimming pool in Atlanta before WW II, goes blind from a raging case of diabetes. The insult is great, but greater still is news of the death of his son Joel (a child Cahill never knew) in an Air Corps training crash. So Cahill journeys with his dog Zack to the Air Corps base in North Carolina, where he's welcomed at first as an object of pity. But not for long: Cahill begins in his sightless way to delve, through heard voices and by way of phrasings alone, into the mystery of Joel's death. Joel, it turns out, was chief magus in a corpsmen-cult called Alnilam, a mixture of astrology, the Aprocrypha, Nietzsche, etc.—and Dickey strives mightily to fix this arcane canopy (not unreminiscent, incidentally, of one of Dickey's own more shaky longer poems, on the Zodiac) over this 683-page novel. But it doesn't come to much—and what perhaps would have held interesting immediacy as a short story turns into a force-fed ordeal of reiterated good-old-boy common sense and highfalutin metaphor. And device: for Cahill's blind-seeker thoughts are, in most scenes, set apart in bold type to one side of the page, while the sighted (and usually dullard) reality is to the other side of the page. The Cahill bold-type—sense-information mostly—runs to the molten flab of Dickey's poetry at its worst ("Which girl is still in the circle where all others are gone? Which face outlasted the death ball? She came at him as through the eye of a lock. His chest was the sound of a coring-drill; in his belly, it massed with the unbroken sullenness of organ music"), and the result overall—rather ping-ponging and eye-crossing—is one less of reward than of a long and wearying confusion.
Pub Date: June 5, 1987
ISBN: 1558170863
Page Count: 770
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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