A literate and literary romp through history and contemporary academia as Parini (The Last Station, The Patch Boys, etc.) gently indicts Christopher Columbus and his fictional protagonist, poet Christopher ``Geno'' Genovese, for their patriarchal misdeeds. A tenured professor at a small Vermont college, 40-year-old Geno, bored with teaching, wants to escape to a warm climate where he can write poems about Columbus. But when his application for a study grant is turned down, and he's ongoingly frustrated with the pettiness of academia—nicely satirized—and with the inevitable misunderstandings of married life, Geno has a brief affair with a student that leads to charges of sexual harassment. Wife Susan, unhappy and dissatisfied, accuses him of being an indifferent father; and his two young sons ignore him. Parallelling Geno's decline and fall is the story of Columbus's equally frustrated search for money and advancement. The similarities between the two men are numerous—both share the same name, both had fathers who failed, both are ambitious dreamers who neglect their wives; and just as Columbus is serendipitously saved by Queen Isabella of Spain, so Geno is equally magnificently rescued: He receives a half-million-dollar tax-free ``genius'' grant from the MacAlastair Foundation. Geno and family head for the Dominican Republic and, on the very Bay of Arrows where Columbus landed, build a house. Here, Geno becomes the quintessential patriarch, bullying his family about. But like Columbus, who turns out to be more sensitive than suspected, Geno—when tried by God and Noam Chomsky, among others, in a magic-realism trial—changes in time. The idyll ends with ``a whelm of conclusiveness,'' and Geno ``sets off, chastened, into life again.'' Witty, imaginative, and refreshing reprise of the now increasingly worked-over Columbus saga, but for all the insights and originality, an ultimately contrived concept.
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-8050-1676-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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