WHITE TRASH

Name: WHITE TRASH
Author: John King
ISBN: 0-09-928306-9

by John King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2003

Genuinely engrossing and utterly creepy, but White Trash suffers badly from a two-dimensional villain (an agitprop meanie...

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Depressing fable of 21st-century Britain takes us inside the warped and febrile mind of a free-market psychopath—in this first US appearance for English author King.

Jonathan Jeffreys is the sort of upper-class villain we’ve met before in the novels of Bret Easton Ellis or films of Mike Leigh: nihilistic, demented, well-connected, well-dressed, and utterly devoid of conscience. A management consultant who specializes in hospital administration, Jeffreys serves as a government inspector, evaluating the efficiency of various hospital facilities and programs. Although he despises unions and looks down on the lower classes as ignorant rabble, Jeffreys is suavely diplomatic and manages to inspire trust and even a kind of affection in the underpaid workers whose jobs he sets out to eliminate. One of these is Ruby James, a nurse at one of the hospitals Jeffreys has come to streamline. Like most of the hospital staff, Ruby sees Jeffreys only as a quiet and polite man who works extremely long hours and keeps largely to himself. It doesn’t occur to her to wonder whether there has been a noticeable increase in patient deaths since Jeffreys arrived, or whether there’s anything unusual in his wandering through remote wards by himself late at night. When Ron Dawes, a retired union organizer whom Ruby looked after in her ward, dies somewhat suddenly one night, Jeffreys makes a point of consoling Ruby (who had grown fond of the old guy). But how much comfort is there in the condolences of a man who, as a child, used to torture his pet dog and likes to relax by urinating into the mouths of prostitutes? And will Ruby be able to sense threat before it turns into full-fledged danger?

Genuinely engrossing and utterly creepy, but White Trash suffers badly from a two-dimensional villain (an agitprop meanie who could have been named Mr. Capitalist), as well as from the colorless normal characters who oppose him.

Pub Date: April 15, 2003

ISBN: 0-09-928306-9

Page Count: 356

Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.