A shrewd, illuminating, and entertaining exploration of the twisted roots of writerly creativity.
Behind the gangsters, corrupt plutocrats, stoic gumshoes, and femmes fatales hovers Dr. Sigmund Freud, who masterminds the mayhem in classic private-eye stories, according to this study in Freudian lit-crit.
Like a shrink decoding a patient’s dreams, Karydes reads the roiling imagery of sex, violence, and betrayal in the stories and novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald in light of these authors’ own troubled family histories. Thus, Hammett’s strained, guilty relationship with his ne’er-do-well father and his mother, who had to shoulder the family’s responsibilities, works its way into idyllic scenes of a neophyte detective and the fatherly boss who mentors him and darker stories of scornful wives turning on failed husbands. Chandler’s clingy mother and self-loathing homosexuality are transformed into sexually voracious women and eye-popping male beauties who beguile his lonely hero, Philip Marlowe. Macdonald’s even clingier, schizophrenic mom appears in his novels in a series of quasi-incestuous relationships between older women and younger men. Freudian interpretations are a natural for private investigator stories. The detective plays the hard-pressed ego, charged with guarding a moralistic superego, embodied in the social establishment, against the underworld’s idlike forces—only to discover in the disillusioning climax that these polar opposites have always been in bed together. Karydes’ take on that critical approach in this debut book, complete with lengthy quotes from psychiatrists and occasionally rote diagnostics—“the Electra complex…is axiomatic in the development of girls”—is sometimes a bit too heavy-handed in its psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Her hero is Macdonald for his long bouts of analysis, his confessional memoir, which she rediscovered and cites extensively, and his self-conscious deployment of Oedipal conflicts throughout his books (“Fathers in Macdonald’s best novels fail to protect their sons by leaving them to mothers who then treat their sons like husbands”). Still, Karydes discusses this gnarly material in a vivid, accessible style that yields cleareyed and sympathetic insights into these authors’ lives and captures the seething psychological power in their works.
A shrewd, illuminating, and entertaining exploration of the twisted roots of writerly creativity.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9909380-6-4
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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