Scott’s luminous prose, references to world events and hints of magical realism never quite coalesce, but Sally is a...
Scott (Everybody Loves Somebody, 2006, etc.) follows the life journey of an impoverished farm girl who repeatedly reinvents herself as she moves from town to town in northern Pennsylvania.
In 1947, 16-year-old Sally Werner, the daughter of German immigrants, is seduced and impregnated by a cousin. Leaving behind her newborn son, she runs away and begins a new life in a small community along the Tuskee River. But when someone from home recognizes her, Sally panics. She steals cash from her kindly employer and runs further north to a new town where she calls herself Sally Angel. She falls in love with a teenager named Mole who makes her genuinely happy until local rich boy Benny carelessly runs Mole’s car off the road. Unaware of his role in Mole’s death, grief-stricken Sally has a brief affair with Benny before she senses his mean streak. She runs again although she soon realizes she is carrying Benny’s baby. As Sally Mole she finds friendship, a good job and a satisfying life with her daughter Penelope in the town of Tuskee until Benny finds her and beats her up. Correctly fearing that he’ll attempt to take her daughter away, Sally runs with Penelope to Rondo where as Sally Bliss she raises Penelope while working as a legal secretary and carrying on a romance with her married boss. Sally’s story is narrated by her granddaughter, who is also tracing her own parental history. Penelope never knew why her fiancé Abe disappeared before the narrator’s birth, although early on the narrator drops the bombshell—Abe left when Sally told him he was her long-lost son. The romantic tragedy is that Sally was mistaken. The novel begins to peter out when Abe initiates contact with the narrator to give her the facts. Abe’s story is just not as interesting as Sally’s.
Scott’s luminous prose, references to world events and hints of magical realism never quite coalesce, but Sally is a character of mythic proportions.Pub Date: April 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-05165-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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SEEN & HEARD
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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