At times indulgent but a highly enjoyable debut novel.
In Ballard’s highly readable, character-driven debut novel, the summer of 1976 proves messy, seductive and life-changing for celebrated poet, wanderer and serial womanizer Arthur Honeyman and all who enter his orbit.
Created as a gesture of personal liberation by farmer’s widow Amelia, the Davenport Summer Retreat for Artists in Michigan is aptly named. The poets and assorted others who have converged on this 100-year-old family farm in 1976 are all in retreat, emotionally and from rocky affairs, troubled marriages, familial relationships, hard choices, former failures and successes. Arthur Honeyman, 59, itinerant carpenter and renowned poet, has hit a fallow stretch. (His lauded earlier work, fueled by rage and bitterness stoked by his now ex-wife, is juicily critiqued by Amelia’s staid son Charlie as “compressed, excruciating blasts of words—opaque stanzas like shrapnel.”) Honeyman also builds benches stenciled with quotes by the likes of Mao Zedong and Janis Joplin, waffles over reuniting with estranged son Pablo, and juggles affairs with married Samantha and nubile poetry phenom Flora. In a delightful little visual, Ballard describes Flora’s painted toes, wiggling in the grass “like the carapaces of hyper blue beetles,” although the author’s fondness for colorful simile can lead to such proximal overindulgences as “the Poet’s bags sat half-packed, lazing like patient hounds at the foot of their master’s bed” and “the farmhouse squatting like a Buddha in the gauzy twilight.” Ballard’s frequent referral to Honeyman as “the Poet,” without a discernable tongue-in-cheek tone, is another distraction. Is the seeming conceit meant to underscore Honeyman’s stature with others? That he lives solely for his art? Is it a sly nod to 19th-century Romanticism? The intent isn’t clear. Ballard maintains his narrative’s robust energy, however, even when plunging lengthily into character-study mode. Over the course of sexual pairings and road trips as far afield as Mexico, lives intertwine on and off the farm, and everyone at the retreat—including pothead and religious college dropout Gideon and Charlie’s secretly far left–leaning girlfriend, Natalia—searches for (and finds, to one extent or other) inspiration, affirmation or at least clarity of purpose.
At times indulgent but a highly enjoyable debut novel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 431
Publisher: Loose Leaves Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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