Since 1975, when his younger brother Robby was arrested (and later jailed) for armed robbery and murder, professor/novelist Wideman (Hurry Home, The Lynchers) has been wrestling with this situation—as a family tragedy, as a sociological puzzle, as a personal torment, as material for his fiction.
Here, then, after long prison-visit talks with Robby, Wideman tries to put it all together—in a dense, restless, tortured mosaic that only occasionally adds illumination to the central knot of anguish. An opening section moves from memories of the 1975 nightmare (a brief visit from fugitive Robby before the arrest) to musings on the brotherly bond, lyrical/earthy vignettes from Pittsburgh family-history, Wideman's guilt over rejecting his black background ("Fear marched along beside guilt"), and an evocation of a visit to Robby in prison. Then, after a strong close-up of Wideman's mother, embittered and "radicalized" by her son's fate, Robby's own recollections take over: childhood jealousy of his successful older siblings, staking out his own territory ("I had to be a rebel"), and becoming a street-smart hood—especially after getting hooked on drugs. ("One day you the King. Next day dope got you and it's the King.") Unfortunately, however, Bobby's confessions—a long, naturalistic drone of shooting up, dealing, stealing—aren't distinctive or revealing enough to deepen the drama here or to help explain the basic mystery: why is one brother a professor in Wyoming, the other in for life at a Pennsylvania penitentiary? And Wideman's own broodings, though sometimes eloquent as they rub salt into the wound, end up pretty much where they begin—despite shifting voices, poetic flights, and verbose, repetitious wrestlings along the way. ("We can't get any further. It's a familiar place. A treacherous convergence of selfishness and caring for another and ego and wanting to be bigger, better than you are and valuing the truth and profiting from untruth and wishing for the best and dreading the worst; a welter of conflicting emotions, a nexus of irresolution and despair, of self-pity and self-disgust, desire and guilt.")
A frustrating book, then—with a powerful initial grab, some of the virtues of fiction (texture and emotion), but only sporadic flickers of drama and insight amid the narrative convolutions.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1984
ISBN: 0618509631
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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