Impressive and ambitious work from a talent to watch closely.
Second-novelist Gann (The Barbarian Parade, 2002) delves into the lives of eccentric and semi-lost regulars at a bar in a forsaken part of town.
The city is Montreux (along the Ohio River, possibly), the once-thriving neighborhood is Old Towne, and the bar, windmill adorning it and alley out behind, is the Don Quixote. And things indeed have fallen far. We meet, for example, Haycraft Keebler, whose father was once the mayor, sufficiently successful, known and honored that his statue still stands in the city park. Haycraft, too, is a political idealist and worker, though his poverty, many oddities and his bipolar medical condition reduce him to the comedic Napoleon-in-rags of the title. Aging ex-hippies Beau and Glenda Stiles own and operate the establishment (its end will come at the close), looking after their flock (the tips jar is for Hay’s rent) and sometimes being looked after in return (Haycraft shares his psycho meds with Glenda). The merit of Gann’s story lies less in what’s told than it does in the telling—a telling that, albeit sometimes slow, is rich, evocative and textured. As the characters’ lives move toward their ends, so moves a whole era toward its end. Haycraft will fall in love with a young street hustler named Lambret Dellinger—with heartbreak the result. Romeo Díaz will lose his lover, ex-ballet dancer Amanda, as she goes off to huge fame as a porn star. And Mather, the retarded boy whom Beau and Glenda have harbored for years, giving him a place to live in exchange for his cleaning up around the place, will die in a scene (though not Gann’s best) of miscommunication and dumb violence. Readers may now and again need a certain patience to get there, but Haycraft’s fate at story’s end—and the conclusion generally—will reward them with closing fictional moments of the wonderful and significant.
Impressive and ambitious work from a talent to watch closely.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-9752517-3-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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