A quirky, fast -paced plot, with characters whose pasts seem almost too neatly awful.
A sometimes rough-edged first novel charts the rocky road that three characters, maimed by their pasts, take to confession and understanding.
When Steve Dant, a recovering drug addict now working for a New York literary quarterly, notices Christine Timberlake at the local post office, he soon finds himself drawn to her beauty. Each week when he mails the office correspondence, he observes Christine arriving at the same time to retrieve anxiously from her box a slim envelope. Then there’s Steve. Steve has no friends and has deliberately kept to himself as he fights his demons by jogging regularly, watching videos, and going to museums on weekends, but he can't keep away from Christine. When she drops her keys accidentally, he picks them up, has them copied, and while she’s at work—she tends a local bar—checks out her apartment. Christine, recently divorced from restaurant-owner Parker Horton, is terrified that Parker will find Petra, their mentally ill young daughter whose condition, Christine believes, was caused by incest. When Parker, desperate to see Petra, hires a p.i. to trail Christine, and Steve, now in love with her and eager to help, discovers where Petra is, the action speeds up. As Christine recovers from a brutal robbery and assault, Steve, followed by the detective heads to Cape Cod, where Petra is hospitalized. There, fearful that the p.i. will take Petra back to Parker, he persuades the authorities to release her into his care. Meanwhile, as a terrified Parker and Christine cooperate to recover her daughter, they revisit their unhappy pasts and confess their secret (and, alas, unsurprising) fears. By the close, Steve will also begin to have a better sense of himself and his past.
A quirky, fast -paced plot, with characters whose pasts seem almost too neatly awful.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9671851-4-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: GreyCore
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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