A hymn to love and an elegy for lost species, but not much of a novel.
A story of extinction from Millet (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, 2005, etc.).
As a boy T. collects donations for charities that don’t exist and serves as middleman for schoolyard protection rackets. In college he joins a fraternity not for community but for connections, and he remains apart from the debauchery. His brothers mock his monastic tendencies, but they appreciate his clear head and powers of persuasion when, say, frat-party rape victims need to be talked out of pressing charges. As an adult T. is a real estate speculator. He has fulfilled the promise of his youth, which is to say he has achieved the apotheosis of human greed and narcissism. Events conspire, however, to disturb his cool self-interest. His father leaves his mother. His mother descends into dementia. And he hits a coyote with his very expensive car, killing it. T. becomes his mother’s caretaker. He tries to communicate with his father. He adopts a dog. He falls in love with a girl named Beth. Transformed by these connections, T. becomes passably human, but he is undone once again by Beth’s sudden death. T. sinks into an abyss of loneliness—which deepens as his mother ceases to recognize him—and his experience makes him aware of the loneliness of animals on the brink of extinction. He becomes, if not an activist exactly, then a self-sacrificing witness to these last creatures. Millet’s latest doesn’t work as a novel—it’s exhausting and disappointing. The author seldom deviates from the expository voice, and her characters exist only in outline. She does, however, offer an interesting disputation on the meaning of life, one that posits love as the only useful response to isolation, even as it acknowledges that loss is the inevitable result of communion.
A hymn to love and an elegy for lost species, but not much of a novel.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59376-184-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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