Less than fully achieved, but a book of considerable strength.
The complex relationship of two sisters who grow up, then apart, on an Oklahoma farm during the 1930s is grittily etched in the Virginian author’s second novel (after The River Beyond the World, 1996).
It’s essentially two distinct books that fit together without much success. In the first, partially crippled Maxine “Mackie” Spoon endures her disability and her quick-tempered sister Etta’s eccentric misbehavior, until it becomes clear that Etta will steal from her the affections of Audie Kipp, the orphaned Indian youth hired to help their widowed father, McHenry, keep his farm operating despite years’ worth of damaging dust storms. Secrets split the family apart: the accident that caused their mother’s death, the identity of the father of Etta’s baby, the guilt borne by McHenry for the death of his brother many years earlier and the hidden truth about Mackie’s paternity. The narrative then concentrates on Mackie’s odyssey away from her kin, her disappointed love for a taciturn married man and the independence with which she learns to shield herself from the claims of numerous relationships. “Book Two” subsequently employs several (only gradually identified) observers and narrators whose encounters with the primary characters disclose what has happened to the Spoon girls and the stoical Audie in the decades following their separation. Peery writes beautifully about the intricate demands of farm life and the arduous process of adapting to a harsh and unpredictable climate, and her characters have the imposing solidity of figures painstakingly carved from unyielding substance. At its best, the novel recalls Josephine Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize–winner Now in November, the bleakly lyrical fiction of Elizabeth Madox Roberts and, in passing, Wuthering Heights. But the puzzle presented by its patchwork second half diffuses tension built up earlier, and even readers absorbed in its particulars may have trouble staying its gnarled course.
Less than fully achieved, but a book of considerable strength.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-25263-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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