Though occasionally clumsy in style and execution, this impressionistic collage will be cherished by admirers of Forrest’s...
A modest posthumous addition to the legacy of a significant African-American writer: five novellas connected by the first-person narration of Joubert Antoine Jones, protagonist of Forrest’s earlier novel Divine Days (1992).
At the close of Divine Days, Joubert fled his family for the University of Chicago and a career as a writer and journalist. Now we encounter him in 1992, an established professor and playwright troubled by memories of his friend and adoptive cousin, Leonard Foster. Back in 1972, Joubert recalls in “Live! At Fountain’s House of the Dead,” he attempted to rescue Leonard, an unsuccessful poet and writer descended into madness, with shared childhood recollections. Forrest (1937–97) characteristically mingles life and death here in Joubert’s anecdote about the first wake he attended as a boy, in a funeral parlor by day that served as brothel by night. But Leonard is unresponsive to Joubert and ultimately dies forgotten in an asylum. The woman who raised both men gets her own novella, “Lucasta Jones in Solitude: Lives Left in Her Wake,” which displays both her languid, aesthetic exoticism and her desperate inability to hold love close. By contrast, Lucasta’s sister, Gussie, is a staid, benevolent woman of simple faith and boundless hope. After a plentitude of rich recollections and plump, warm reverie, Joubert is mortally wounded in a gang-related shooting; his lingering death scene suffers somewhat from a purple tinge. Nonetheless, these short fictions fill in gaps and explore secondary characters important to a comprehensive understanding of Forrest’s art. A foreword by Forrest’s widow and critical apparatus by friends John G. Cawelti and Merle Drown don’t especially enhance our understanding of the work at hand, but they’re harmless expressions of enthusiastic advocacy.
Though occasionally clumsy in style and execution, this impressionistic collage will be cherished by admirers of Forrest’s lifelong effort to engage in fiction the African-American legacy of personal reinvention and loss.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8101-5114-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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