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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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