McLaughlin delivers stirring imagery, a deeply moving look at American poverty and, most impressively of all, a realistic,...
In Oakland, a young man struggles to rise out of poverty and take care of his girlfriend and infant son, but his past seems to prevent him from moving forward.
Split into a prologue and three distinct parts, this book belongs to Jake Robertson; his voice is strong as he tells his story, although the language of the book—full of creative compound phrases, striking imagery and lyrical passages—can be confusing or repetitive, especially during action scenes. The prologue introduces Jake as a child, traveling from Chicago to Oakland with his family. Here readers meet his dad and witness firsthand the troubled relationship that is at the heart of the story. Part One jumps into the current day, where Jake struggles to provide for his girlfriend, Noel, and their potentially asthmatic son, William, despite trouble Jake is having with his caseworker and the man who runs the labor hall on which he relies for work. While this section feels a little drawn out, the book hits its stride in Part Two, which provides insight into the events in Jake’s life that defined him and brought him to where he is now. Jake comes to life as a character here—a flawed, troubled man with good intentions. McLaughlin deftly builds his tale so that, once Part Three begins, readers have a deep understanding of Jake, as well as the central conflict of the tale. Jake’s father has been released from prison and is looking for his son so that he can include Jake in a scheme that would solve all his problems. However, Jake’s involvement in this plan will force him into a confrontation with his father and bring to light secrets that have been buried for a long time—secrets that have shaped Jake’s identity. The strength of Jake’s character, and the skill with which McLaughlin creates him, makes this a compulsively readable book. By the time Jake is forced to make a decision that will change his life, readers know enough about him and about his past to know what is at stake—and the resolution doesn’t disappoint.
McLaughlin delivers stirring imagery, a deeply moving look at American poverty and, most impressively of all, a realistic, relatable character in Jake Robertson.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1572336452
Page Count: 292
Publisher: University of Tennessee
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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