Modernist, random sci-fi weirdness seemingly beamed in from the James Joyce/William S. Burroughs/Last Words of Dutch Schultz...
A godlike being who is an interplanetary Earth ambassador and a time traveler recalls his manifold adventures saving the cosmos in this debut novel.
At age 4, the supernatural entity named Lewis must take on human mentality and winds up working in a Connecticut office. Even so, his impressive IQ (described as the fourth highest ever) draws the attention of the U.S. Navy and Colin Powell. Lewis not only serves in the Navy, but is also appointed an Earth representative for the United Planetary Federation, even though assassinations disrupt the meetings—and in the remote future (or past), civilizations rise and fall and threats are fought (or will be). Because Lewis marked his apotheosis by time-traveling to infinity, the fabric of reality has started to come undone. In fixing it, he meets Father Time (who really exists). Lewis embarks on epic exploits in his seven other immortal lifetimes. Viewers of TV’s Doctor Who may enjoy the way Feinland, a poet, manages to make this highly experimental piece bigger on the inside than the outside—just like the time machine/spacecraft TARDIS. In a slim 109 pages, he info-dumps terabytes of sci-fi jargon; alphanumerics and acronyms; author references/genre shoutouts (John Scalzi); invented words (“cataclypse”); poetry; complex, technical manual-style instructions; and metaphysical musings. It’s the epistle of a sort of god or demigod who, while born on Earth, is actually of Olympus lineage (though Jesus crosses his path, as do the devil, Buddha, and Sitting Bull). When the narrator speaks of seeing psychiatrists and getting a regimen of psychotropics, it begs the question of whether to interpret any of this literally or as the artfully described schizoid ravings of a lunatic savant off his meds: “From my office which was my enterprise, bridge command; sort from my helm..Or was enterprise is now plastic and the universally Messianic deed be done. Paradise lost be found, it’s heavenly response. Kingdom come and the last eternal link be round, that link being physically the mild core (plutonium 181) but not energy.”
Modernist, random sci-fi weirdness seemingly beamed in from the James Joyce/William S. Burroughs/Last Words of Dutch Schultz outer-asteroid field.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4327-9677-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Outskirts
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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