Second-novelist Goldman (The Slow Way Back, not reviewed) adds to the mini-genre of “Where did I go wrong as a mother?”
Eighteen-year-old Early (Earl) Smallwood, a popular honors student whose parents are members of the upper-middle-class white liberal establishment of Charlotte, South Carolina, has admitted killing a black teenager and setting his car on fire to hide the evidence. Awaiting Early’s sentencing, his mother Kathryne reconsiders their family’s history to understand how her darling boy could have committed such a heinous act. Simpering, superficial, and overindulgent Kathryne is not the most trustworthy narrator, and Smallwood’s skill at making her realistically unlikable slips into overkill early on. From the day of Early’s birth, Kathryne works to keep her son’s life as easy as possible, just as her annoyingly sweet mother did for her. Kathryne takes umbrage at her husband Peter’s tougher approach to child-rearing, and, although the disagreements often seem piddling, by the time Early reaches adolescence, the stress within the marriage has driven Peter into an affair. As Peter and Kathryne try to repair their marriage, Early falls increasingly under the sway of his best friend Chip. Is Chip a bad influence? Is Kathryne blaming him to avoid admitting that Early might drink, smoke pot, or lie? Tough love advocates should appreciate the book’s loud and clear argument against permissive parenthood—not that Early’s misbehavior is beyond the norm until his crime, which is itself frightening precisely because it feels so random, a tragic case of accelerating teenage tempers and impulsiveness. Ultimately, Goldman dodges answering her own provocative questions about parenting. Early gathers moral courage in prison, while Kathryne, now divorced, learns to give him independence—or so she says.
An odd combination of vehement message and purposely ambiguous characters: admirable but not entirely enjoyable.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-059458-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
