A broken young woman living in bleak little Suspicious River, Michigan, compulsively reenacts the role of victim in the sexual and physical violence she witnessed and suffered as a child—in a chilling but elegant first novel by poet Kasischke. Leila Murray's life is grim even before she takes up small- time prostitution. At 24, she's a night clerk in the local Swan Motel (named after the white swans who breed endlessly on the banks of Suspicious River), is indifferently married to a boy who got her pregnant in high school, is sterile from an abortion, and is parentless, penniless, careless. As the novel opens, she's been turning tricks for $60 at the Swan and hoarding her profits for- -she's not sure what, though she longs for something; and one night she meets a local drifter named Gary in whose charm and vicious temper she senses a route to what she really wants. In increasingly frightening set pieces that leave the reader rapt, Gary slyly sets Leila up to be his working whore, servicing his friends, as Leila, believing herself loved, begins to relive the time 17 years before when she watched as her beautiful mother, then the same age Leila is now, was slashed to death by Leila's father's younger brother. Leila also recalls the series of men—teachers in parking lots, tradesmen in the woods, even the town minister—who seduced or raped her after her mother's death, practically under the nose of her enfeebled father, who soon died of a heart attack. Now, as she's kidnapped by Gary, robbed of her savings, and bound in a dark room while a line of his friends snakes though, she understands what she was saving her money for: a white casket, like her mother's. She almost gets her wish to die, but oddly—bleakly- -escapes back to the Swan Motel. Lyrical, suspenseful, rich in imagery—and grim. Those who like Joyce Carol Oates will love this one. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-77397-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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