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THE CAPTIVE CONDITION

Name: THE CAPTIVE CONDITION
Author: Kevin P. Keating
ISBN: 978-0-804-16928-8

by Kevin P. Keating ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2015

There’s a substantial gap between the author’s dark vision and the characters who must enact it.

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Keating’s second novel is a study of small-town misery and depravity, with Gothic trimmings.

Normandy Falls is a Rust Belt town bordering the Great Lakes. It has dying industries and a college whose founder, Nathaniel Wakefield, abandoned scholarship for satanic practices and sired 12 “children of sin” whose descendants infect the town. One of the students, who narrates occasionally in the first person before yielding to others' viewpoints, is Edmund Campion, named, puzzlingly, after the English martyr. His faculty adviser, Martin Kingsley, is married but conducting an affair with a townie, Emily Ryan. Emily’s husband, Charlie, is a frequently absent merchant mariner, so Emily must raise their malicious 8-year-old twin daughters alone. The strain has driven her to drink, and early on she’s found floating in her pool, an apparent suicide. Keating’s novel has many similarities to his debut, The Natural Order of Things (2014): the post-industrial town, the lack of a protagonist, the humiliations heaped on his unpleasant characters (even Kingsley’s young son is a “horror-movie toddler”), and the use of hyperbole; over-the-top is Keating’s favorite place. Much of the novel belongs to three dissolute middle-aged men: Charlie Ryan, back for his wife’s funeral; Xavier, chef/owner of the downtown bistro; and the Gonk, the college’s director of maintenance and (shivers) a Wakefield descendant. The Gonk owns an antiquated still, and his moonshine is the main ingredient of a popular drink, The Red Death. (Emily had the recipe.) Its only rival is Xavier’s concoction, a psychedelic juice using the jazar carrot. Keating may not like his characters, but he lingers lovingly on these drinks. He steers the novel erratically toward two murders, a mass drowning, and a “fantastical hellscape” waiting for faculty guests at a New Year’s Eve ceremony.

There’s a substantial gap between the author’s dark vision and the characters who must enact it.

Pub Date: July 7, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-804-16928-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.