Yamashita (Brazil-Maru, 1992; In the Arc of the Rain Forest, 1990) now turns her political concerns into an ambitious but cluttered, apocalyptic riff on immigration, the homeless, and NAFTA as the Tropic of Cancer moves north. Like the TV news program that Japanese-American Emi, a television executive, is responsible for, the novel cuts from scene to scene, character to character. And, again like the news, the effect, despite the underlying political preoccupations, is more often an incoherent collage than a cohesive commentary or convincing, perceptive interpretation of what ails society. Down in Mexico, where Rafaela is supervising construction of Chicano journalist Gabriel's house, she discovers a particularly nasty thug dealing in human body parts and flees north. Simultaneously, oranges filled with poison arrive from Mexico, killing innocent buyers and, in one instance, causing an accident that closes L.A.'s Harbor Freeway. The shut-down leads to a riot, the riot leads to a brutal shoot-out, and the shoot-out leads to the National Guard being brought in to restore order. But order, of course, can't really be recovered. As Emi, Gabriel's lover, hastens to cover the action—the cars abandoned by their owners on the freeway are mysteriously taken over by the homeless, who plant gardens under the hoods—Gabriel picks up the trail of the shadowy figure selling freshly harvested body parts to ill, wealthy Angelenos. Meanwhile, Bobby, Rafaela's Chinese husband, helps an illegal immigrant; Buzzman, a good samaritan in the 'hood, becomes a TV star; Archangel, a mysterious performance artist, heads to L.A. to wrestle with SUPERNAFTA in the ultimate wrestling contest; and, above the almost motionless freeways, an old Japanese man conducts an imaginary orchestra. Yamashita clearly means to offer some kind of wake-up call, but it gets lost in the profusion of plotlines and characters. Los Angeles's own apocalypse, with a great cast but poor direction and a story too rigorously intent on sending a message.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56889-064-0
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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