Still: Perceptive and close to brilliant, when it’s not trying too hard to be funny.
What you might get if you crossed Bret Easton Ellis with Salman Rushdie.
Of course, Wenzel’s second outing (after Lit Life, 2001) is written like neither of theirs. Where Ellis and Rushdie come in for comparison here is in regard to its protagonist, Kyle Clayton. He’s one of those bad-boy Manhattan novelists whose meteoric fame seems in inversely proportionate to the length of their slim but award-studded volumes. Clayton hit big in the 1980s and has acted like a pompous bad-boy ever since. It’s now the late ’90s and he’s desperate for a comeback. And where better to mine material than from his marriage to a Muslim Turkish woman, a marriage that necessitated the WASP-y Clayton’s conversion to Islam? After a magazine publishes an excerpt of the book (it starts with the line, “All Muslims are mad, of course”), things become a bit strained between Clayton and his wife Ayla and her family, what with the death threats and all. On the edges of Clayton’s self-destructive behavior—he’s a raging, barely recovered alcoholic—is Erin Wyatt, a struggling actress he once had a fling with. Erin is now waiting tables at the city’s hottest eatery, City, owned by Loomy Tumin, a blindingly rich investor who has a thing for Erin and who’s going to be interviewed by Clayton for a Talk-esque magazine. Unlike many novels of New York, which try to eviscerate a particular subculture, Wenzel’s has an omnivorous, Tom Wolfe-ian appetite for the city at all levels and a rakish ability to sketch it all in howlingly funny, satirical ways. By the time it all comes to its explosive if somewhat hollow finish, though, Wenzel has probably bitten off more than he can chew and has to try too hard to bring the whole to its sort of upbeat conclusion.
Still: Perceptive and close to brilliant, when it’s not trying too hard to be funny.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-09400-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
