A novel with the best intentions doesn’t automatically work as fiction.
English journalist Lowe turns a politically correct exploration of slavery on West African cocoa plantations into an excruciatingly shallow relationships saga in New York City.
Journalist and reporter Samantha Blackwood has just come from the Côte d’Ivoire with filmmaker and lover Paul on a mission to expose worker exploitation at cocoa factories. Her task in New York, where she lives and works freelance, is to get the marketing director of a family-owned chocolate company at Rockefeller Center, T&B, to agree to an on-camera interview—although Matt Dyson has no idea that Samantha is working in cahoots with a pesky political action group that’s publicly denouncing T&B’s shameful factory practices. Incredibly, top executive Dyson, a young workaholic with no time for dating, knows nothing of his own company’s doings—exposing some of the story’s faulty interior machinery. Second-novelist Lowe (Tunnel Vision, 2001) seems to care deeply about injustice between rich and poor, strong and weak—as we see in his depiction of Sam’s previous abusive relationship—yet he lacks the adequate stylistic equipment to elevate character above the sketchy level of, say, an article in a women’s magazine. Moreover, the tale is heavily, obviously plotted: Naturally, the antagonistic Sam, the journalist, and smug marketer Matt have to find a rapprochement—which occurs handily when the two are accidentally locked up for the weekend at T&B’s factory in Baltimore. Too good to be true—they fall into vats of chocolate and build a bonfire with the help of purloined cognac supplies. Lowe knows a lot about chocolate, but little about New York City—or Boston or Baltimore, for that matter—as shown through vague and imprecise description. Yet what does emerge is an honest journalist’s intent to expose the despicable practices of American marketing, and on that level Lowe’s effort can be indeed useful.
A novel with the best intentions doesn’t automatically work as fiction.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8209-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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