Editor of The American Scholar and a prolific essayist (A Line Out for a Walk, p. 314, etc.), Epstein debuts in fiction with this collection of nine stories, almost all of them about middle-aged Jewish men who grew up in the West Rogers Park area of Chicago. Many of these competent pieces serve the ideological agenda of the magazine in which they first appeared, the neo-conservative Commentary. ``Marshal Wexler's Brilliant Career,'' from the point of view of an Allan Bloomish Univ. of Chicago professor, tells of a student who becomes a prominent radical-chic publisher and writer. It's bush-league Tom Wolfe, with an added Zionist twist. As in several stories here, Epstein proves to be a poor man's Saul Bellow—his talking heads spout a cultural conservatism that really, underneath, suggest a defense of vulgar ambition. A number of profiles here concern class difference among Jews, and reveal a parvenu's interest in snobbery. ``The Count and the Princess'' chronicles the unlikely passion of a snobbish Polish ÇmigrÇ for a suburban divorcÇe, a ``Jewess'' not at all of his style. Similarly, ``Kaplan's Big Deal'' finds a wealthy, unencumbered Chicago businessman pursuing a divorced prof because he loves and admires her well-mannered son. In a number of stories, lower-class, hard- working Jews tell of those who've arrived. In the not very subtly named title piece, the remarkably athletic sons of a wealthy lawyer and his glamorous wife eventually meet their downfall, and in ``Paula, Dinky, and the Shark,'' an accountant's wife surveys the lives of her best friend's family, gangsters she's known since youth. Epstein's high esteem for the self-made businessman is further revealed in ``Low Anxiety,'' in which an office-furniture dealer links his daughter's abortion to his sense of cultural decline. ``No Pulitzer for Pinsker'' and ``Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig'' attack novelists for their duplicitous manipulations of reality. Epstein writes with sledge-hammer subtlety about characters already familiar from Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and even Richard Stern. A book of minor ethnic interest.*justify no*
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-03022-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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