From Herman, ex-Editorial Director of Ticknor & Fields: a first novel about love in midlife that aims for a passionate and philosophic height but lacks a hero to keep it there. Life seems a shower of blessings for David Smith: graduate of Yale, dweller on Park Avenue, importer of wines, father of four, and devoted lover of a beautiful, capable—he'd have us believe perfect—wife. But then, around age 40, a great emptiness descends upon him, and David—while protesting his unchanged love for kids and wife—deliberately sets foot onto the path of adultery. ``It seemed,'' he confides, ``that without the love of women I would die,'' and in the opening parts of the novel he brings passion into the life of beautiful, monied, and unhappily married Anne Stokowski, who (``Oh, David, sometimes I feel I can't stand it any longer! Why don't we run away together someplace?''), however, proves only a warm-up for the main event, which is David's high and doomed affair with the gloriously beautiful HÇläne, the half- American and half-French countess of Compiäre. HÇläne has deep secrets in her own past, and a rich complexity of sorrows, that make her far more dependent upon the less-than-perceptive David than he knows, and his refusal to give up his marriage for her- -while insisting she see no one else—drives her to an impasse so narrow that death is her exit. The novel's most moving—and most authentic—sections are HÇläne's, making the reader all the sorrier to be left at end with the masterfully shallow David, who actually seems to believe himself deserving of our pity even after ruining others' lives (including his wife's) for reasons never once proven in the least convincing. ``I was much perplexed in spirit and sometimes feared for my grasp on things,'' he says, saying more than he knows. Ambitious, romantic—and disappointingly meager. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47815-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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