Pungent and hilarious, if completely off the deep end: Ames is like a perpetual undergraduate jokester, whom you either love...
A demented picaresque about a Portnoy-ish neurotic (and his valet) who leaves the safety of Montclair, New Jersey, and heads for the untamed wilds.
As he showed in his earlier nonfiction, Ames (My Less Than Secret Life, 2002, etc.) appears to be a very strange young man: self-absorbed, sexually obsessed, utterly paranoid—traits shared here by his alter ego, Alan Blair. A young writer with one novel to his credit, Alan is 30 and working on his second book, a roman à clef about an obscure playwright who was his roommate for a few years. Having received $250,000 in a lawsuit for slipping on an icy Park Avenue sidewalk, Alan has the means to take it easy for a while. So he’s hired a valet named Jeeves to look after him in the New Jersey home of his uncle Irwin and aunt Florence—Alan’s only family since his parents died some years before—and given up any pretense of working for a living, but drinking like a fish instead. So much so, in fact, that his uncle and aunt show him some tough love by showing him the door. Alan takes it in stride and heads off to the Catskills with Jeeves. There, he stays in a forgotten Hasidic resort, goes on a bender, and gets in trouble by telephoning a “for a good time call” number he found in a gas station. He’s rescued, if that’s the word, by winning a fellowship to an arts colony in Saratoga Springs, where (probably for the first time in his life) he’s surrounded by a group of people even weirder than himself. He drinks a lot more, contracts pubic lice, is accused of theft and anti-Semitism, and falls in love. He even manages to write a little.
Pungent and hilarious, if completely off the deep end: Ames is like a perpetual undergraduate jokester, whom you either love or hate on first sight.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3004-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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