This collection of short stories, all of them from The New Yorker which does not diminish any appreciation of their reappearance here, presents Cheever in the medium in which he was not only first established but is perhaps, critically, most valued. Not that the stories or the Wapshot novels are very disparate in either tone or theme, dealing as they do with a sense of estrangement in what should be that most secure world, the upper middle class. Cheever's paradise lost is for the most part suburbia; there are gazebos on the lawn; bomb shelters underneath. Somewhat faceless, characters (Cheever deals in archetypes) appear and disappear in a world which, for all its familiarity, is very menacing. It is also bewildering ("the lateness of my time of life and my inability to understand the things I often see"). And frequently despair triggers an antic feat: the furniture-hurdling husband of an earlier story appears again in “The Swimmer” making his cross county, pool to pool return to the home he has lost. Then there's the preposterous fear of “Angel on a Bridge,” or the rejection of modern life; the dreadful civic and cultural zeal of “An Educated American Woman,” which kills her son and destroys her marriage; the disconsolate “The Seaside Houses,” where a summer tenant has a stranger's life to exercise. These, along with a fine Italian piece, “The Bella Lingua,” are characteristic and notable examples of Cheever's gifts as a fabulist obsessed with individual bankruptcy in an affluent society. They all express an irredeemable sense of loss and loneliness.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0575009071
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964
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
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