Ames follows I Pass Like Night (1989) with a gentle account of a burgeoning friendship between two likable oddballs. When 25-year-old Louis loses his teaching job at a Princeton day school after the principal’s wife catches him trying on a colleague’s bra, he decides on impulse to move to New York City. He answers an ad seeking a roommate and thus meets Henry Harrison, a putative writer, well on in years, who dyes his hair with mascara and spends his mealtimes being taken around town by wealthy ladies. Henry’s apartment is cramped—and flooded with evocative smells—but Louis responds to his new acquaintance’s eccentricity and the whiff of irony that accompanies his extreme opinions: he agrees to move in. Louis looks on in wide-eyed wonder as Henry sleeps till noon, keeps in shape by dancing to Cole Porter records, washes his clothes in the shower, and seems not to mind that the plays he’s written are lost in the chaos of the apartment. Louis himself gets a pleasant enough job working at an environmental journal. He lusts after Mary, a female co-worker, but also hangs out at a transvestite club, where he occasionally pays beautiful youngsters for “dates” more memorable for his partners— vulnerabilities than for the awkward sex. As Henry comes to trust and like him, he teaches Louis his tricks for doing Manhattan on the ultracheap: they sneak into shows after intermission, eat their fill at art openings, and enjoy some memorable binges with Henry’s hard-partying coterie of widowed ladies. Henry’s unpredictability and benign theatricality make these outings hum, but Louis is also winning on his own terms—upfront about his hunger to be liked, unfazed by squalor, endlessly appreciative of Henry’s spirit and kindness. The sexual-confusion subplot is murky and entirely lacking in resolution, but who cares? It’s just plain fun to watch these quasi-misfits fall for each other.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84504-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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