A multiracial girl, Asian-American, lurches to maturity and understanding with the help of her Japanese grandmother. Wise grandmothers are a familiar staple in fiction: Keepers of the ancestral flame and secrets, they are expected to instruct the young in family lore, and Ellen’s does just that, but it takes a while. Ellen, the eldest child of Scottish father Gene and Japanese-British Sara, has a lot of issues to work through before she can love her ailing grandmother. The family, which has never put down roots anywhere, moves to Japan from the US when Sara learns that Gene is having an affair, an affair that Ellen is also aware of. Just ten when she first meets her grandmother, a former actress, she’s chagrined to be described by the old woman as someone without a soul. She lives with her grandmother, who teaches her Japanese legends and customs, until her parents buy a house on a northern island. There, though Ellen still feels like a sea cucumber—a protean and unfixed life-form’she adjusts to living in a strange country. She goes to school; discovers she’s artistic; draws naked women for her repressed science teacher, who befriends her; watches her two brothers fight with American boys from the military base, one of whom spitefully slays the family pets; and comes to feel increasingly connected to her grandmother and heritage. This connection is affirmed when the grandmother dies while traveling with Sara and Ellen to their ancestral house. There, the grieving Ellen is visited by a spirit who cheers her by promising that truth endures for the pure of soul. A overwritten first novel, more like a series of set pieces, that hints at deeper issues—family lies, secrets—but never really digs below the surface to mine them. Despite the Japanese setting, an undistinguished coming-of-age tale.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56689-075-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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