A novel of the old school: chockfull of know-it-all literary allusions and very hard not to like.
An Alcott-inspired, sweetly smug, old-fashioned third by Weber (Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, 1995, etc.) about three likable sisters who reject their perfect parents after a moral slipup.
Meg, the competent romantic and junior at Yale; plainspoken Joanna, almost 17; and 15-year-old impetuous Amy are the three Green sisters who have grown up in New York City under the intellectual and morally nourishing guidance of inventor Lou and academic mother Janet. Yet once the girls stumble on an incriminating e-mail from one of Janet’s smitten graduate students—he calls their mother his “little fuckbird”—they righteously decide to leave home and move into Meg’s New Haven apartment for the school year. What ensues is a touching struggle as the girls try to sustain themselves with little money, foil hostility in the inner-city public school, and maintain neutral relations with their nice-guy orphan roommate, Teddy Bell, who deconstructs their intentions and has to negotiate their collective PMS. The premise—that the Green parents would let the daughters desert the household without a battle—would be far-fetched in the hands of a writer less skilled, but Weber fleshes out her lively, spontaneous characters with tremendously affecting detail. She also enlists comments from the so-called real people involved in the making of the book—the sisters, for example (MG, AG), and the supposed writer herself, Joanna Green (JG). Italicized comments by these “observers” appear from time to time (after a long passage about Lou and Janet’s courtship, MG exclaims, “Boring, boring!” and AG angrily refutes her character’s portrayal: “I wasn’t as much of a loser as you want me to be for the purposes of your stupid novel”). These annotations, initially intrusive, gradually assume an amusing and integral part of the narrative. The sisters’ sanctimonious unity is ruptured when Meg becomes enmeshed with an older, married scholar—a letdown, too, for anyone rooting for these smart-alecky, precocious young ladies.
A novel of the old school: chockfull of know-it-all literary allusions and very hard not to like.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-18959-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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