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NIGHTSPAWN

Name: NIGHTSPAWN
Author: John Banville
ISBN: 1852351268

by John Banville ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 1971

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Whatever else Banville may be up to, he surely does scintillate and that's enough.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1971

ISBN: 1852351268

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DROWNED
by John Banville

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LOCK-UP
by John Banville

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SINGULARITIES
by John Banville

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WHISKEY WHEN WE'RE DRY

by John Larison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2018

Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's...

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A young woman with a knack for trick shooting heads west in the late 1800s to track down her outlaw brother.

Jessilyn Harney, the folksy narrator of Larison’s third novel (Holding Lies, 2011, etc.), has grown up watching her family lose its grip on its prairie homestead: Her mother died young, and her father is an alcoholic scraping by with small cattle herds. He’s also persistently at loggerheads with Jess' brother, Noah, who eventually runs off to, if the wanted posters are to be believed, lead a Jesse James–style criminal posse. So when dad dies as well, there’s nothing for teenage Jess to do but head west to find her brother, which she does disguised as a man. (“A man can be invisible when he wants to be.”) Her skill with a gun gets her in the good graces of a territorial governor (Larison is stingy with place names, but we’re near the Rockies), which ultimately leads to Noah and a series of revelations about the false tales of accomplishment that men cloak themselves with. Indeed, Jess’ success depends on repeatedly exploiting false masculine bravado: “I found no shortage of men with a predilection for gambling and an unfounded confidence in their own abilities with a sidearm,” she writes. The novel’s plot is a familiar Western, with duels, raids, and betrayals, brought thematically up to date with a few scenes involving closeted sexuality and mixed-race relationships. But its main distinction is Jess’ narrative voice: flinty, compassionate, unschooled, but observant about a violent world where men “eat bullets and walk among ghosts.” The dialogue sometimes lapses into saloon-talk truisms (“Men is all the time hiding behind words”; “Being a boss is always knowing your true size”). But Jess herself is a remarkable hero.

Like a pair of distressed designer jeans, the narrative's scruffiness can feel a little too engineered, but the narrator's voice is engaging and down-to-earth.

Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-7352-2044-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- PROFILES
John Larison

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THE NAMESAKE

by Jhumpa Lahiri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2003

A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.

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A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.

The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.

A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.