Better-than-average Oates, all the same.
A hybrid, somewhere between (her pseudonym) Rosamond Smith’s suspense thrillers and the melodramatic clashes of opposites in earlier works like Wonderland (1971) and American Appetites (1989).
Oates’s gazillionth novel, if anyone’s still counting, focuses initially on Joshua Seigl, a former novelist and classics scholar approaching 40, living in self-imposed solitude in the upstate New York college town of Carmel Heights. Unable to find a suitable male research assistant, he impulsively hires Alma Busch, the eponymous beauty who also bears a “disfiguring” facial tattoo, as well as a resentful vagrant and criminal past dating back to her upbringing among the semiliterate, bigoted working-class poor of the Akron Valley, where coal mine fires burning ceaselessly underground symbolize Alma’s own buried emotions. A potentially fascinating dynamic unites white-trash Alma with Seigl, absorbed in his translation of the Aeneid and in hypochondriacal obsession with an undiagnosed “nervous disorder.” Alas, Oates also introduces Alma’s brutal lover and pimp, café waiter and college dropout Dmitri Meatte, a scheming underachiever who encourages Alma to ingratiate herself with “the Jew” and bleed him of his wealth. Dmitri is a cartoon, but less unbelievable than Seigl’s older sister, named (with equal improbability) Jet. This “homegrown Cassandra” obtrudes herself into Joshua’s life (irrationality incarnate, threatening his scholarly monkishness), appears to have been defused, then rises again, to precipitate the lurid, explosive finale. Oates is onto something with the bruised, malleable figure of Alma (whose emotional vacillations are very real indeed), and Joshua Seigl’s own fluctuations between scholarly integrity and a consuming temperamental weakness make him one of Oates’s most interesting recent characters. But The Tattooed Girl is flawed by the insistent presences of Jet and Dmitri, who have nothing like its principals’ realness.
Better-than-average Oates, all the same.Pub Date: June 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-053106-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring...
Quite a departure from Dugoni’s dark novels about Detective Tracy Crosswhite (The Trapped Girl, 2017, etc.): the frankly inspirational tale of a boy who overcomes the tremendous obstacles occasioned by the color of his eyes.
Samuel James Hill is born with ocular albinism, a rare condition that makes his eyes red. Dubbed “the devil boy” by his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, the Catholic school his mother, Madeline, fights to get him into, he faces loneliness, alienation, and daily ridicule, especially from David Freemon, a merciless bully who keeps finding new ways to torment him, and Sister Beatrice, the school’s principal and Freemon’s enabler, who in her own subtler ways is every bit as vindictive as he is. Only the friendship of two other outsiders, African-American athlete Ernie Cantwell and free-spirited nonconformist Michaela Kennedy, allows him to survive his trying years at OLM. In high school, Sam finds that nearly every routine milestone—the tryouts for the basketball team, the senior prom, the naming of the class valedictorian—represents new challenges. Even Sam’s graduation is blasted by a new crisis, though this one isn’t rooted in his red eyes. Determined to escape from the Bay Area suburb of Burlingame, he finds himself meeting the same problems, often embodied in the very same people, over and over. Yet although he rejects his mother’s unwavering faith in divine providence, he triumphs in the end by recognizing himself in other people and assuming the roles of the friends and mentors who helped bring him to adulthood. Dugoni throws in everything but a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and then adds that trip as well.
Although the author acknowledges in a postscript that his story is perhaps “too episodic,” his life of Sam Hell is inspiring and aglow with the promise of redemption.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4900-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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