Three free-floating—or crisscrossing, if you prefer—novellas relating the continuing, creative, and not fully credible adventures of Leib Goldkorn, the Åbermensch refugee who first appeared in Epstein’s Steinway Quintet (1976). In this telling, he emerges as perhaps the most indomitable Jew to walk through a lion’s den since Daniel. Although he was born in Vienna at the turn of the century, Leib Goldkorn’s whole life seems much more suited to the New World than the Old. At home everywhere—but seemingly without a fixed address—Leib, now 97, is a wanderer who’s seldom at a loss in new surroundings and seems to run into old friends wherever he goes. In “Ice,” we find him stuck in Paris during Kristallnacht. True, it’s better than being in Vienna, but the whole continent is starting to look bad. Fortunately, fate intervenes in the person of Daryl Zanuck, who sends off a telegram demanding that he come to L.A. to compose the score for a new Sonja Henie film. “Fire” is a continuation of Leib’s Hollywood saga, in which he finds himself conducting a shipboard romance with Carmen Miranda en route to South America, and “Water” puts him still farther afield in the South Seas, where he manages to rescue Esther Williams from a tribe of cannibals. The stories overlap, though, and contain digressions enough—usually female—to make Tristram Shandy (or even Tom Jones) lose his train of thought. There’s Leib’s beloved Crystal Knight, the most brilliant ingÇnue ever to be airbrushed by Larry Flynt. And Clara, Leib’s longsuffering wife, who resurfaces in his memory every so often to remind him that he’s an honest man. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the mysterious, inscrutable, and vaguely nefarious ice queen whom Leib finds himself pursuing through the streets of Manhattan with a positively adolescent obsessiveness: Michiko Kakutani. Defies convention in any strict sense, but who cares? Epstein’s imagination is as fluid as quicksilver and as volatile as magnesium.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04804-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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