Coming up with a judgment on Something Happened (you'll wait a while for that something to happen — nothing does until the shattering clincher) should be the hottest game of Russian roulette in town this fall. There's probably more riding on this book than any other in terms of author anticipation and publisher expectation. It runs close to 600 pages and is full of repetition which can be one of those suicidal assets ("call the repetition perseveration" — that's Heller) in what amounts to a story without a story sans the pseudo of those now dated anti-novels. Heller's novel, Heller's tour de verbal force, Heller's stomp then, is a representation of the underachieved contemporary man boobytrapped all the way from his harassment at home to the office where he's making his way up over someone else's body. Perhaps he's closest to one of Roth's middle-aged, self-made victims, full of lapsed hopes and more guilts than any man should have to assume. Ecce homo — Bob Slocum, always on the verge of something ominously imminent — prostate, suicide, failure, death — while only having experienced a string of little satisfactions, "jobs, love affairs and fornications." Slocum figures negatively as husband of a wife who now drinks too much even if she has become more amatory in the process, father of a daughter who challenges, provokes and undermines him, also of a son who is diffident and withdrawn whom he loves best of all, and non-father of Derek whom they prefer not to think about at all. He's retarded and "looks like lockjaw" when he talks. Hardly a new type, Bob Slocum, on the cramped plateau of middle-age, "tense, poor, bleak, listless, depressed," and rightly feeling that "there is no place for me to go." He's infinitely vulnerable. And undecided. Should they put Derek away? Should he get a divorce? "l have acrimony. . .I have more pain than acrimony." Obviously there is none of the rogue absurdism or imaginative verve of Catch-22; only a circular sameness which one may justify (even if it is monotonous) with the Teacup observation of a much more serene man, Oliver Wendell Holmes: "What if one does say the same things — of course in a little different form each time — over and over. If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do." It is worth saying (or reiterating — however you want to look at it) to the degree that Slocum is symptomatic of this age — beleaguered all the way from his bad teeth to his rotten conscience. We know him only too well and it is the recognition factor which counts, along with the book's bravura, expertise and cumulative hook. . . . Whatever, wherever, Heller's Kvetch-570 will be read and read and read.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1974
ISBN: 0684841215
Page Count: 582
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
There isn’t much of a plot here, the book being swept along by a series of sometimes hilarious, oft-times clever,...
An impressively witty satirical first novel, London-set, chronicling the experiences of two eccentric multiracial families during the last half of the 20th century.
When Archie Jones’s suicide attempt on New Year’s Day 1975 is stymied by a finicky butcher (who frowns upon such things taking place in a car parked illegally in front of his establishment, especially when he’s awaiting an early morning delivery), his life is changed forever. Lamenting the break up of his marriage, the distraught and disoriented Archie—a middle-aged Brit who fancies himself in the direct-mail business but actually spends his life folding papers—then wanders into an end-of-the-world party where he meets his next wife. Jamaican Clara Bowden is 19 to Archie’s 47, at six feet tall she towers over him, and she’s missing all her upper teeth, the result of a motorcycle mishap. Nonetheless, six weeks later the mismatched pair are married and living near Archie’s WWII buddy Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim. And so begins Smith’s frenetic, riotous, unruly tale, which hops, skips, and jumps from one end of the century to the other while following the Jones and Iqbal broods. Archie and Clara have a daughter, Irie, whose name translates into ``no problem'' (although she has plenty of them); Samad, who is head waiter at an Indian restaurant, has twin sons, Millat and Magid. When they’re nine, their father separates the boys, sending Magid back to Bangladesh to be raised the old-fashioned way, far from the corruption of postwar London, filled with its mods and rockers and hippies and Englishmen and other bad influences—including Samad himself, who has been lusting after his twins’ schoolteacher.
There isn’t much of a plot here, the book being swept along by a series of sometimes hilarious, oft-times clever, occasionally tedious riffs on everything from race relations through eugenics and on to religion, but 25-year-old Smith is a marvelously talented writer with a wonderful ear for dialogue.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50185-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down.
The relationship between a privileged White mom and her Black babysitter is strained by race-related complications.
Blogger/role model/inspirational speaker Alix Chamberlain is none too happy about moving from Manhattan to Philadelphia for her husband Peter's job as a TV newscaster. With no friends or in-laws around to help out with her almost-3-year-old, Briar, and infant, Catherine, she’ll never get anywhere on the book she’s writing unless she hires a sitter. She strikes gold when she finds Emira Tucker. Twenty-five-year-old Emira’s family and friends expect her to get going on a career, but outside the fact that she’s about to get kicked off her parents’ health insurance, she’s happy with her part-time gigs—and Briar is her "favorite little human." Then one day a double-header of racist events topples the apple cart—Emira is stopped by a security guard who thinks she's kidnapped Briar, and when Peter's program shows a segment on the unusual ways teenagers ask their dates to the prom, he blurts out "Let's hope that last one asked her father first" about a Black boy hoping to go with a White girl. Alix’s combination of awkwardness and obsession with regard to Emira spins out of control and then is complicated by the reappearance of someone from her past (coincidence alert), where lies yet another racist event. Reid’s debut sparkles with sharp observations and perfect details—food, décor, clothes, social media, etc.—and she’s a dialogue genius, effortlessly incorporating toddler-ese, witty boyfriend–speak, and African American Vernacular English. For about two-thirds of the book, her evenhandedness with her varied cast of characters is impressive, but there’s a point at which any possible empathy for Alix disappears. Not only is she shallow, entitled, unknowingly racist, and a bad mother, but she has not progressed one millimeter since high school, and even then she was worse than we thought. Maybe this was intentional, but it does make things—ha ha—very black and white.
Charming, challenging, and so interesting you can hardly put it down.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54190-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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