A witty thoughtful debut about a middle-aged Louisianan’s sexual and psychic confusion as he’s prodded from every side over the three days preceding his 47th birthday. A midlife crisis can be a pretty tedious affair, not least for the hapless bystanders who have to hang around and watch it. Here, narrator Gatlin is an investment counselor, level-headed, not given to cheap sentiment and prodigal displays of self- absorption, and he has seen more than enough idiocy in his friends” lives to teach him the lessons of emotional restraint. Rusty and Cliff, for example, are both making holy fools of themselves over the same woman—unaware that she’s playing them both in a very open field—while another friend, Rich, has gradually morphed into a kind of Southern Mother Teresa, working with the indigent and visiting prisoners at the state penitentiary. On the eve of his 47th birthday, Gatlin can—t really afford to scoff: slowly but surely, he sees that the narrative of his life has already been set and that there is little he can do at this point to alter its direction or shape. But that doesn—t keep him from wanting to try. He and his wife Sarah have had a largely happy life together, but there are a few unhealed wounds even so—especially Sarah’s inability (despite repeated miscarriages) to have a child. When Gatlin finds that he has a business meeting scheduled with Madame X (Rusty and Cliff’s new obsession), his mind turns to more than P/E ratios. Can he get over it? Or are all men, always and everywhere, doomed to humiliate themselves beyond redemption in their middle years? Perhaps this is the only way that they can see their way clear: “We begin by letting go. By accepting what’s happening and going forward.” Though a bit precious and more than slightly self-indulgent, Tarlton’s story is still a compassionate and moving account of men reaching for the final stage of maturity.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-882593-30-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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