Keene debuts in fiction with a dense, intelligent, poetic, highly allusive word-tapestry that takes on subjects low and high, brings up scoopfuls of history, theorizes endlessly—and tells the story of a boy growing up black in St. Louis, beginning with his birth in 1965 and ending as he heads for Harvard. An easy read it isn't, however, as suggested even by the titles of its short, prose-poem-like ``chapters''—``Signs, Scenes, a Psychic Trail of Assignations,'' for example, or ``Permanence or Evanescence, the Process of the Real.'' Yet the book does have an ongoing logic and narrative as an inner-city childhood is followed by a move to the suburbs, and as the nameless boy gradually becomes aware of his sexuality, intellect, and his interest in literature and poetry. Of daily life, there are siblings, the changing seasons, school and parents, a grandfather who grows vegetables, a great-aunt who expects good manners and decorum. The boy himself is called a sissy, is ridiculed for getting good grades, is ``chosen . . . last for any sport requiring aggression,'' and yet he's also the subject of his own grown and golden-tongued biographer, who says of him that ``His heart is a grotto bearing witness to other's kindnesses,'' or who mentions ``The kitchen of his body in which the fires of history were blazing.'' The history blazing inside is the history of region, race, self, and nation, and Keene summons up all, though briefly and always allusively. ``Our generation possesses only a cursory sense of the world that our ancestors braved,'' he declares, ``though the burdens of history bear unmovably upon us.'' As for his own method of pastiche, disjunction, and fleeting detail: ``The effect is essentially novelistic, though its fictiveness remains another matter.'' Tiny, and filled with enormous themes: a tour de force of intelligence, wordsmithing, and passion, with only a few notes slightly flat, and only now and then.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1995
ISBN: 0-8112-1304-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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