First published in 1987 in France, Kaplan's drifting, pointillistic attempt to evoke four New Yorkers' existential angst may strike American readers as more comic than elucidating with its quasi-meaningful juxtaposition of ghetto blasters with abrupt, inexplicable sexual battles among white people. Translated by a French psychologist and novelist impressed with its ``subliminal violence and disturbing beauty,'' this paper-bound film noir is unlikely to inspire a fan club here. They met in Central Park one Sunday: Julien, a handsome rogue with a mysterious past; Anna, a sensible single woman with a job at a school; Mary, a boutique saleswoman and young mother; and Chico, a passionate Latin American waiter. What connects them from their first meeting is their fascination with Mary's young daughter, Nathalie—a generic character whose youth, rather than any innate personality, serves to unleash the adults' own deepest fears and hopes suppressed since childhood. The four adults pair off—Anna with Julien, Chico with Mary—and spend several fragmented, sporadically tortured New York seasons together, sharing parties and breakfasts and trying to ignore Julien's increasingly unhealthy love for Nathalie. ``Do you know the Brooklyn Bridge?'' Julien continuously demands of Nathalie and the others. ``On this bridge...you see the sea and the city and it gives you a fabulous impression. The world, the world is a cathedral.'' The statement is supposed to mean something—but Julien's friends fail to heed the message, caught up as they are with such obsessions as Mary's: ``You feel it, at that very moment,'' Mary says of her daughter, ``...she's completely calm, on her back, she's waiting, you can feel it, she's waiting for something from you, she's eagerly waiting and, at the same time she's giving to you, as well, without saying anything, she would like to give to you.'' French postmodernism and the Brooklyn Bridge? Something was lost in translation.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-88268-112-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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
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