Pizzichini’s indulgent wallowing in her subject’s excesses leaves the impression that Rhys was little more than the crazy...
Atmospheric but sloppily written, skimpily researched biography of the British novelist whose depressed, dependent heroines echoed her own neurasthenia.
Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in the West Indian colony of Dominica, Jean Rhys (1890–1979) apparently sustained lifelong damage from her mother’s indifference and the terrifying tales of zombies and werewolves related by a nursemaid. She rarely had close female friends after moving to England in 1907, and felt hardly any better about the men who both supported and demeaned her once she quit an uncertain career as a chorus girl and began years of passively living on the chancy largesse of her lovers and three husbands (two shady operators and one failed literary agent). She began chronicling blank, bleak existences like hers in fiction in the mid-’20s, when novelist Ford Madox Ford published her in the Transatlantic Review under the name Jean Rhys. (He also entangled her in a ménage à trois.) “She writes about long periods of nothingness with an insight born of bitter experience,” writes British literary journalist Pizzichini (Dead Men’s Wages, 2002). “Textual elisions punctuate her words, reflecting her blankness.” The biography has a similarly flat affect, noting with no moral judgments Rhys’s heavy drinking, fits of rage and seemingly total inability to take care of herself. The productive decade that produced Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and two other novels, equally notable for their stark prose and sordid subject matter, ended in 1939. Rhys would not publish another book until 1966, when Wide Sargasso Sea brought her late-life fame with a fictional reimagining of the mad wife from Jane Eyre. Aiming to write about her subject “on her own terms,” Pizzichini essentially relies on Rhys’ autobiographical novels and Carole Angier’s more thorough Jean Rhys (1990) for factual details, concentrating on limning her precarious emotional states with cringe-inducing empathy.
Pizzichini’s indulgent wallowing in her subject’s excesses leaves the impression that Rhys was little more than the crazy drunk people often took her for.Pub Date: April 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-05803-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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