Evidently even John Steinbeck "takes a walk" now and then. This is it. We hope he doesn't continue to walk downhill. For here is a book that will inevitably be a bitter disappointment to those who have put John Steinbeck at the top of the roster of American writers today. Always before his bums, his down and outers, his "under-privileged", his Okies, his itinerant workers, his drifters have invoked a certain magnetic fascination rootet in the sheer love of their creator for his creations. Some have accused Steinbeck of being sentimental about his people. Nobody could accuse him of being sentimental about any of the unprepossessing aggregation of unpleasing humanity brought together at a wayside safe from which a short line bus operates. There's the proprietor, driver of the bus, Juan- least objectionable, perhaps, and warmed by a spirit of charity. There's his temperamental, possessive and violent wife, Alice, who takes out her spleen on all and sundry, with flies and the downtrodden hired girl, Norma, as chief victims. There's Pimples-most unpalatable of adolescents, who is a mechanic of sorts, sex ridden and depraved. And then there are the passengers held over while the bus is repaired- an unsavory lot, from the Pritchads, who hated each other but tried to put up a front as a united family, to the salesman with a suitcase full of rather morbidly unpleasant tricks, and the girl whose sex lure provided the flash which set off the latent dynamite. The story is a slight one, and rarely does it emerge from the mire of fleshly obsession, the mark of language and motives and concentration on the physical. A thoroughly distasteful and unpleasant book, unredeemed by the flash- the spark that to most justified anything John Steinbeck wrote. Because what he does well, he does so extraordinarily well, it is all the more appalling when he descends to the depths of vulgarity.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1946
ISBN: 0142437875
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1946
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
New York is colonized by giant talking canines in newcomer Bakis's wry variation on the traditional shaggy dog story. Imagination is the key here. We need to understand that at the end of the 19th century a crazed German biologist named Augustus Rank performed a succession of medical experiments that resulted in a weird genetic mutation of his subjects and created a race of ``monster dogs''—giant rottweilers and Dobermans who can speak and walk on their hind legs. After living for more than a hundred years in the seclusion of a remote Canadian settlement called Rankstadt, they are forced to move in the year 2008 to New York (where 150 of them take up residence at the Plaza Hotel) when Rankstadt is destroyed. In their 19th-century garb—Prussian military uniforms for the ``men,'' bustles for the ``women''—they cut impressive figures on the streets of Manhattan, where they quickly become celebrities and philanthropists. At Christmas they parade down Fifth Avenue in sleighs, and shortly after their arrival they construct an enormous Bavarian castle on the Lower East Side. When an NYU coed named Cleo Pira writes about them for a local newspaper, the dogs adopt her as their spokesperson and bring her into the inner life of their society. From Cleo's perspective the dogs are benign, quaint, and deeply tragic, and the more fascinated she becomes by their history—both as they relate it to her and as she discovers it for herself through Rank's own archives—the darker and more doomed their society appears. By the time Cleo has learned the secrets contained in Rank's past, it's too late to save his descendants, who have unknowingly brought about their own destruction. Serious enough, but also funny and imaginative: a vivid parable that manages to amuse even as it perplexes and intrigues.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-18987-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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