A pulsating portrait of the American fin-de-siecle, as immediate and unsettling as your morning newspaper, but more compulsively readable. Oates's (Black Water, 1992, etc.) darkly comic work — set against a background of industrial decline, urban decay, racial strife, and political corruption — is permeated by death, from its opening page, when Timothy Corcoran is gunned down in front of his house on Christmas Eve 1959, to the apparent suicide 32 years later of Marilee Plummet, a young black woman who has charged a radical black Union City, NY, councilman with rape. Oates sucks us into the flood-of-consciousness, the whirling vortex that is the mind of Tim's son, Jerome Andrew "Corky" Corcoran, on Memorial Day weekend 1992. Now 43, what does he think about, what does he live for? Sex, food, sex, drink, sex — anything to obliterate the memory of his father's bloody corpse, his mother's subsequent madness, his loneliness, his sense of impending doom. "Oh, Christ, he's happy, never so happy as at such a time, lips, tongue, teeth, fingers, his cock erect and bobbing...pure sensation and no memory of Jerome Corcoran now." Corky has hauled himself up from Union City's low-rent Irish Hill to become a successful real estate developer and city councilman. He is filled at once with vanity and self-loathing, proud of his $35,000 Caddy, his upper-crust ex-wife and equally upper-crust mistress. Yet, paranoid, he fears each smile from one of his friends is really a smirk of derision. Corky is not the best of men: He's just slapped his mistress around. Neither is he the worst of men: "In weakened states he tends to speak from the heart." His investments are turning sour; his ex-father-in-law and mentor has just refused him financial help; his rebellious stepdaughter has stolen the Luger automatic from his bedside drawer. This weekend will bring Corky the truth — about the corruption behind his father's death and the corruption of his own political friends. A moment of dignity will be within his grasp. Will he reach for it before it's too late? This question drives Oates's dazzling novel, brilliant both stylistically and in its depiction of a man running desperately for his life.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93836-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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