Old-fashioned, rich in detail and incident, a story of marvelous skill and poignancy: Maillard is a national treasure.
Vancouver-based Maillard returns to West Virginia, where he was born and bred, in this finely rendered account of a young man stranded in a hardscrabble mill town.
Raysburg (the setting of Maillard’s previous trilogy: Gloria, 2000, etc.) was a gritty place in the best of times—and the best of times were long over by 1969, when Jimmy Koprowski returned from the Army. He’d never got beyond Guam, where he repaired B-52s, so he’s not one of your shell-shocked Vietnam vets, then, but he’s still got problems. The steel mill in Rayburn closed down years ago and there’s little for an ambitious young man to do. Jimmy gets a job repairing TVs, but what he really wants is to head out to Texas for work in the burgeoning aeronautics industry. It’s not so easy to get away, though. Even if he had the cash to float himself for a few months (which he hasn’t), he would feel held back by the presence of Old Bullet Head (his father), his kid sister Linda, and his friends from the neighborhood (most as aimless as he is). And, just as Jimmy is finally working up the nerve to break loose, a further complication develops in the person of Connie, a wealthy married woman from the other side of town. Jimmy and she begin a torrid, obsessive affair (as for how obsessive, they often have to resort to makeshift venues like the back of Jimmy’s car for their trysts). Like many men in his stymied position, Jimmy is also drinking too much—way too much. But there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, being shone by Janice Dluwiecki. A friend of his sister’s, Janice starts out as an annoyance to Jimmy, but the two eventually fall in love. Can he get rid of Connie, stop drinking, and get on with his life?
Old-fashioned, rich in detail and incident, a story of marvelous skill and poignancy: Maillard is a national treasure.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30889-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings.
When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog’s branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusive—and abused—mother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldier—his grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog’s loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a “redneck” from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel’s earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival.
A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56202-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
