An author’s note reveals Shekleton’s intention to continue with Father Tierney’s story, and a considerable number of readers...
Shekleton (A Jesuit Tale, 2000) begins his second novel moments after the title character, a closeted gay Catholic priest, tests HIV-positive.
Father Joe Tierney’s decision to seek advice from a trusted friend leads him to a clandestine support group for HIV-positive clergy. Meanwhile, a freelance reporter investigating the issue of AIDS in the Catholic priesthood moves closer to discovering the support group. Angela Roth, director of public relations for the diocese, undertakes her own research as she tries to formulate a measured response to increasing media scrutiny. The conflicts between Angela’s professional obligations and personal beliefs represent one of the novel’s highlights. Likewise, the author evokes Joe’s Mexican-American heritage by incorporating Spanish words and phrases that are authentic, yet unobtrusive for readers not familiar with Spanish. This well-paced narrative maintains a consistent sense of urgency, where each critical decision has potentially disastrous consequences. Although the use of clunky similes and metaphors can weigh down the narrative voice at times, Shekleton is generally more successful when he allows the characters to speak for themselves: “I guess I see myself as bruised, kind of like a corpse, a badly beaten corpse—a corpse like you’d find in a crime lab. The bruises, they’re deep….But the problem is: no one else sees the bruises. No one else knows how deep they go. I’m not even sure how deep they go.” This morbidly familiar image from television crime dramas goes a long way to illustrate the themes of identity—visible and invisible, embraced and stigmatized—at the heart of the novel. Those who wish to read of erotic adventures in the rectory will not find them here; sexual content is demure and understated. After all, the author seems to imply, sex is part of the story, but not the whole story.
An author’s note reveals Shekleton’s intention to continue with Father Tierney’s story, and a considerable number of readers may want to accompany him further in this exploration of faith, identity and community.Pub Date: June 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462009268
Page Count: 246
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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