Bleak and believable.
Writer-producer Ridley (Everybody Smokes in Hell, 1999, etc.) takes a somber look at the life of an African-American comedian in a country not quite ready for him.
Ridley has also done stand-up, so even though there are no laughs in this wise, restrained, and thoroughly detailed story of an almost-made-it, the backstage feel is authentic. Jackie Mann is the son of a domestic whose death, in the midst of the Depression, leaves him in the care of a defeated, addicted, and brutal father in Harlem. Jackie is no athlete and no tough guy, needing the protection of his friend Li’l Mo just to survive on the playground, but early on he discovers the power of humor to get himself out of situations and even to be admired. That ability proves useful when he and Li’l Mo hire on as lumberjacks in Washington State for a summer, where they’re surrounded by scary rednecks and where he has his first taste of an audience in an amateur show. Skipping college, which he couldn’t have afforded anyway, with no connections and only a modicum of nerve, Jackie sets out as a comedian, trying out material on a few postmidnight customers at a 14th Street burlesque house. There, he also befriends Fran Kligman, an aspiring singer, and hooks up with Sid Kindler, a small-time agent who believes Jackie has the stuff for a career. He also has his first sight of the love of his life, the beautiful young singer who will go on to become the Motown star Tammi Terrell. Tammi is only one of Mann’s real-life characters—Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone, Mort Sahl, and especially Sammy Davis Jr. all have roles, and Jackie Mann’s determination to appear on the Ed Sullivan further places the story squarely in its time. Jackie almost makes it to the top, but it’s a cruel trip that costs far too much.
Bleak and believable.Pub Date: June 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-52836-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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