No one can fail to be impressed by Joyce Carol Oates' prolificacy. In ten years, she has produced more than a dozen books of fiction and poetry, plus several critical works. Prolific, but then she's prolix too — unpolished and imprecise. That vagueness and lack of definition in her style transfers a sense of turmoil and an atmosphere of anxiety to the reader unable to locate the key to her knots — and all Oates' characters are in those situational tangles where either and or are equally murderous. You know her characters: there are just two kinds — the upper-middle alienated professionals and the lower-middle chronically unemployed. In either case their lives are empty, fragmented, estranged — "taking place in a kind of puddle that was always getting smaller" — like the family that takes in cousin "Ruth," who gets pregnant by her lonely uncle and elopes, only he dies in an auto accident, and poor Ruth is bereft again. Oates' favorite climaxes are those crack-ups and the other kind; and even the shrinkers themselves — the faceless questioner of "& Answers" who wants to know why the heroine killed her daughter by driving off a cliff, the Laingian lover whose freethinking conflicts with the woman of "I Must Have You," the self-motivated crew at the "Psychiatric Services" — are hopelessly entrapped in suburban garden-variety angst. Loving "perfectly" is all they desire and what they lack; all losers down the line, there's a recurring motif of molestation and sexual abuse. Oates strains so hard to expose the nerve vitiating the American dream — that need for status, mobility, progress and that something else driving her men and women to violence, brutality, suicide, over and over again without resolution. All so mysterious, yet unaffecting as soap opera, pre-fab with true-to-realism names, sets and props, slightly melodramatic — but the only tragedy here is the author's decreasing talent.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1974
ISBN: 044922774X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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