A superbly rendered first-person narrative about a depressed woman who may or may not be getting better, this novel was first published in Scotland and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Galloway's sheaf of stories, Blood (1991), was seen here as bleak, powerful, uneven. Here, Galloway all but drowns herself in her scrambled heroine, Joy Stone, a 27-year-old drama teacher who lives outside Glasgow with trembling nerves and a superfine sensitivity to all shades of overcast. Be warned, Galloway's lyric psychological realism is as dense as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, her page an inventive litter of relentless subjectivity. Joy Stone is not the manic-depressive her name implies; she's just depressed and locked into endless black chat with herself as she reads horoscopes and letters to an advice columnist (``Dear Kathy, Please help me...''). She obsessively cleans her living room, prepares tea and biscuits for a visit from a health visitor from the social service that pays her rent (the overweight health visitor seems as depressed as Joy), goes through her skin-sizzling bathing ritual, throws out fresh food she finds viscous as plasma, uses nail-scissors to keep her pubic hair neat, perfumes between her toes, skips work often, refuses to talk with her psychiatrist about the accidental drowning of her lover and retreats inward. (``Tears drained backwards into my ears. I was floating up toward the ceiling, inflating with something like love: serene and distant as the Virgin Mary, radiating truth from the halo of stars round my head. I knew so much''). The end: midnight whisky-pictures of Joy as a mermaid in black waves. A woman with more problems than you, dreadfully well done.
Pub Date: May 15, 1994
ISBN: 1-56478-046-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
