A riotously edifying take on civic and private responsibility in an age of elaborate morals.
The author of The Good Life (1999) returns with his second: a hard-hitting, at times sidesplitting tale of trust, temptation, and redemption.
Hudson City is a bust, a pockmark on New York’s upstate. You can’t even buy good coffee in this tired industrial town. Then Sue, a lovely Afro-Asian, is linked to a strange healing; citizens and officials insist, for reasons not entirely spiritual, that a miracle has occurred. People dream about the Miracle Girl, and, presto, kidney stones are dissolved, that sort of thing. Soon, pilgrims throng to the city, accompanied by oppressively hot winds. But the miracle plays the devil on Quinn, a lapsed Catholic employed by his diocese to sell Church properties. It’s all he can do to drive the big, blunt, “shut this [miracle] down” Bishop through crowds. (In one of the funnier scenes, the Bishop orders him to defy a police barrier.) Things worsen when Quinn, who made a pile calculating available square footage for a prior employer, is asked to work his old magic to house pilgrims. His arduous schedule coincides with three dilemmas: romantic (his girlfriend, to whom he long ago gave herpes, has grown mysteriously distant), moral (a slick-speaking “friend” proposes a shady deal with the city’s chief landowner), and spiritual (his televised fainting spell, promptly spun as religious ecstasy, leaves him confused). Scribner plants his hero knee-deep in scruples, revealing the gray side of corruption, its agonizing logic and bantering alliances. We experience up-close the weather, temper, and architecture of a city hobbled enough to justify extreme gambits; we root for a couple who cling to their fading relationship, and their fading town, with a stubbornness bordering on piety. Some touches chafe—ours is a hero who takes the measure of himself in the mirror and hasn’t had a dream he can’t remember; his meditations on physical space feel strained; Sue seems a trifle underwritten—but, overall, these are quibbles.
A riotously edifying take on civic and private responsibility in an age of elaborate morals.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-250-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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