As angry, witty, and sweeping as The Bonfire of the Vanities.
Dunne’s volcanic posthumous novel follows the circus surrounding a brutal torture killing of a saintly African-American laborer.
Nobody has a bad word to say about Edgar Parlance, the local odd-jobs fixture who was partly skinned and murdered outside the bucolic hamlet of Regent, South Midlands, evidently by opportunistic thrill killers looking for a black victim. Instead, the public’s considerable fury is lavished on no-good suspects Duane Lajoie and Bryant Gover. But Duane’s half-sister, bratty Carlyle, the world’s most famous teenaged model, begs Teresa Kean, the civil-liberties lawyer whose parents Dunne killed off in Playland (1994), to defend him against both the law represented by state’s attorney J.J. McClure and the media frenzy personified by J.J.’s wife, “don’t call me Congresswoman” Poppy McClure, a right-wing tub-thumper who’s hoping to ride the case into the Governor’s mansion. Teresa enlists as her second chair J.J.’s former boss Max Cline, who was eased out of the Attorney General’s office over “lifestyle issues” and now teaches at an uncredentialed local community college, and joins battle—not to win her unwinnable case in court (once Bryant Gover turns State’s evidence, life without parole is the best she can hope for her client), but to fight the rising tide of politically expedient hatred, toadying, infighting, partisan scrambling, and attempts to claim the top of the greasy pole. The result is less a legal thriller—all hopes for a tidy resolution are dashed by a shockingly foreshortened ending—than a viciously funny carnival. Dunne stays above the fray by using Max’s pen to tar every participant, himself included, with a prose by turns jittery, racy, and venomous, and tossing off dozens of wildly inventive subplots involving such fauna as a lesbian talk-show host, a porn star turned cattle baron, and a college football hero who doesn’t mind hurting ladies.
As angry, witty, and sweeping as The Bonfire of the Vanities.Pub Date: May 16, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4143-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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