In a novel seemingly about a man's coming to terms with his own humanity and the depth of feeling within his heart, Begley (The Man Who Was Late, 1993; Wartime Lies, 1991) is unlikely here to evoke any depth of feeling in the reader's heart. He's too busy flaunting his considerable knowledge about the pretensions of the rich and the portentousness of the gifted. Max Foster, a distinguished law professor at Harvard, has led a life devoid of deep emotional attachments. On holiday in Italy, he becomes reacquainted with an old friend named Charlie Swan, a brilliant architect who has taken up a life of homosexuality after a painful divorce. Charlie's current lover is a beautiful boy named Toby, a spiritual orphan who becomes the older man's son/lover/apprentice. The paths of Max and Charlie cross frequently over the course of the novel, as Max begins to open his heart to the love of various women, most notably a duplicitous English intellectual who becomes his wife. The problem is, although Max is supposed to become a more sympathetic character as the book progresses, Begley never really lets us inside the heart of his protagonist. Max says he is hurt when his wife leaves him, but the reader feels no affinity for his pain. Begley does, however, frequently drop the names of exotic locales, prestigious families, and fancy liqueurs. Only when Toby is diagnosed as having AIDS does Max exhibit any kind of real emotion, and even then, it pales in comparison to Charlie's desperation. Nonetheless, As Max Saw It is an enjoyable read, most notably for the magnificent character of Charlie Swan, a man so outsized in his feelings and appetites that he dwarfs everyone else in the novel.
Pub Date: April 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43307-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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