The evil eyes of small-town America seem to peer from every page of Meno’s claustrophic noir, where the good and the bad are...
An ex-con can’t seem to catch a break in his old hometown.
After robbing a liquor store one ugly night, Luce Lemay drives drunk and loses control of his car, killing a child in a baby carriage. A couple years later, at the start of the story, he’s released from an Illinois prison and catches a bus for La Harpie, the small downstate town where he was born and raised. Luce isn’t happy about going back—his crime wasn’t the kind that people tend to forget—and La Harpie itself holds no promise: “A place of a kind of quiet villainy and secret lust.” But there’s a job there, at a gas station where Juinor, a friend from prison, has put in a good word for him. Luce has barely gotten back into town when he runs into Charlene, the younger sister of a girl he dated in high school (and who’s now in a mental institution, possibly due to Luce). They each carry a doomed torch for one another, but Charlene’s ex-fiancé isn’t having any of it. Luce struggles through the days, living in the same rooming house with Junior, an odd, older man-child who turns the gas-station signage into abstract poetry and carries a miasma of fate and death about him. Second-novelist Meno (Tender as Hellfire, 1999), a Columbia University writing professor, coats this world with Luce’s fatalistic worldview (he’s apparently incapable of seeing beyond the moment, or imagining any good in the world). For such grim subject matter, the author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace, never succumbing to the overkill that American gothic tales are often prone to, seeming to take his inspiration equally from the stories of Jim Thompson and the lyrics of Nick Cave.
The evil eyes of small-town America seem to peer from every page of Meno’s claustrophic noir, where the good and the bad are forced down the same violent paths.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-039433-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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