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THE PETTING ZOO

The novel doesn’t feel unfinished so much as unbalanced.

Posthumously published, this narrative raises provocative issues concerning art, celebrity, creativity, sexuality and spirituality, while never quite working as a novel.

Before his death at the age of 60, Carroll had earned renown decades ago, as a teenage memoirist (The Basketball Diaries, 1978), a poet and a punk-rocker. The protagonist of his only novel is Billy Wolfram, “the golden boy of the New York—indeed international—art world. Billy was only 38 years old, and his star had risen steadily since his first show at 21.” Though Billy is both a prodigy and a Manhattan native like his creator, the painter isn’t merely an authorial stand-in. He receives visits from a talking raven who is apparently immortal (it shares memories of Noah and the Ark) and who serves as both oracle and muse. He has also been celibate since his unfortunate attempt at masturbation may have had a causal connection with the Kennedy assassination. The bare-bones plot begins with Billy’s anxiety attacks, which land him in a mental ward after he attends the opening of an exhibition that suggests to him how much spirituality his own work lacks. During his recovery as something of a recluse, with a looming deadline for his next show, he takes stock of his life through memories of pivotal passages and through minimal interaction with his assistant, Marta, and his boyhood friend, the rock star Denny MacAbee. Much of the stilted dialogue expands into multi-paragraph soliloquies, as Billy doesn’t so much converse as expound. (“ ‘One thing’s for sure, there will be no meeting of minds if our elected officials continue to slash funding for public art—mainly because of their own antiquated tastes and moral codes.’ ”) The author has a lot to say about art—its creation and consumption, its relationship with sex and spirit—but this isn’t the best platform.

The novel doesn’t feel unfinished so much as unbalanced.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-670-02218-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010

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OF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define.  Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


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THE ROAD

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Awards & Accolades

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  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

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

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