Timely but not the author’s finest work.
An acclaimed American author looks at sexual abuse.
On a warm summer night in the 1970s, teenage Jo convinces her two best friends, Carly and Stephanie, to steal a golf cart at the country club and go for a drunken joy ride. Jo is behind the wheel, so she is the one responsible when an accident leaves Stephanie dead. Jo and her family become outcasts in their small Maryland suburb, so it seems like a stroke of luck when Jo is accepted into an elite boarding school in Massachusetts. Hawthorne is full of kids from Manhattan, the children of the rich and famous. Jo left home because she had become an outcast, but she’s no more welcome in her new school than she was in her hometown. The only person who takes much interest in her is a charismatic English teacher the students simply refer to as “Master.” Unfortunately, it soon becomes clear that his attention isn’t the good kind. Much of Jo’s story will be depressingly predictable to most readers, from a powerful man using his position to prey on children to the skeptical, largely untroubled reaction Jo receives when she tries to tell a school administrator what happened to her. But Walbert doesn’t bring much that’s new or thought-provoking to this familiar tale. Part of the trouble is formal. Walbert is well-known for both her short fiction and novels-in-stories like The Sunken Cathedral (2015) and Our Kind (2004). Her new book is being marketed as a novel; at 160 pages, it’s more of a novella, but what it really feels like is a short story that outgrew the form without quite becoming something else. There are flashbacks to the night of the accident that add nothing since what happened is not a mystery; Jo begins her narration with a thorough account of that night. There is also a superabundance of information about Hawthorne—its history, its traditions—when all the reader needs to know is that it’s a New England prep school. Most problematic, though, is the emotional flatness of the story, which is particularly disappointing from a writer as skilled at illuminating the inner lives of women as Walbert.
Timely but not the author’s finest work.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9939-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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