In this British debut, a convincing character has an unconvincing affair. The gimmick: Said character is very pregnant. Presumably intended to be shocking, the scenes of narrator Susan's pregnant extramarital sex are on the whole less accomplished than her imaginings of her cruel father's own unhappy upbringing. The novel opens just after her father has gassed himself to death with carbon monoxide and, as a final divisive act, left his entire inheritance to daughter Penny, excluding her sisters, Susan and Sara. Susan, it becomes clear, has been moving somnolently through life with her dunderhead husband, Alistair, and only when she is close to giving birth does she come alive, through an affair with an American artist named Lenny. At the same time, she begins to have visions of the ghost of a small boy wandering through her London home. He turns out to be her father, who had suffered at the hands of his mother, a bizarre woman who once maliciously served Susan and her sisters pancakes with pins in them. These glimpses of the past are the strongest sections here, even though they occasionally go too far and make the characters unpalatable rather than interestingly gruesome. Other passages are less successful. A description of how Susan finds Alistair's solidity comforting during their courtship is sharp with detail, nicely revealing how her father's strange ways have conditioned her, but her accidental pregnancy is dismissed in a sentence: ``And that was it, the end of freedom and choice.'' Likewise, the cuckolded Alistair and the slightly pretentious Lenny are colorless compared to Susan's father and grandmother. The choppy structure serves the subject well, however. Although her narration is intensely self-focused, Susan never becomes whiny or self-pitying about her dismal existence, and Myerson's depiction of her pregnancy is full of lifelike discomfort. Patchy, but more successful than most takes on dysfunctional family life (and afterlife). (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47506-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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