Syndicated in many alternative papers, Barry has collected nine volumes of her deliberately childlike comics and has also published a first novel, The Good Times Are Killing Me (not seen). Like the Simpsons” creator, Matt Groening, Barry supports her crude line drawings with her smart text, which is always hand-lettered above the picture, and often overwhelms her ugly- beautiful illustrations. Here, she gives voice to Freddie, the troubled brother of Marlys and Maybonne, who were the focus of previous volumes. Though the individual stories—each six or so frames, with one two-frame panel per page—begin innocently enough, Barry’s poignant tales soon turn quite dark. Dismissed as “Freddie the Fag” by his older cousin Arnold, Freddie follows Arnold and his friend Jim-Jimmy-Jim in a demented plot with a violent end. Things turn even worse: Freddie hallucinates everyone as talking skulls, and his only friend at school first engages him in pubescent homosexuality, then dies from choking. Freddie retreats further into weirdness and is placed in special ed classes where his new friend, “Spaz-Eyes Gigi,” also disappoints him. “El Fagtastico,” as Freddie calls himself, grows stranger over time, and Barry narrates his sad history with visual sympathy and allows Freddie to speak for his own sorry self. A surprisingly moving, visually engaging collection.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57061-106-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Desani, born in Kenya, educated in India and currently a professor at the University of Texas, offers his first book in some 40 years: 23 stories and fables, along with a dramatic prose poem, that range from bleakness to ironic comedy and from supernatural tales to highly mannered satires. The prose poem—which tells the story of ``Hali,'' who loves Rooh, whose death plunges Hali into grief and a mystical journey— is most noteworthy as an example of private mythology turned into accessible invocation. The supernatural element in many of the other fictions is strong: ``The Valley of Lions,'' for example, is short and visionary; ``Mephisto's Daughter'' concerns a narrator who has access to ``Old Ugly's daughter''; and ``The Lama Arupa'' follows the holy man of the title through ``several states of consciousness'' after his death until he returns as a chicken. ``The Merchant of Kisingarh'' is told by a deceased merchant speaking through his son, a sometime medium. These pieces manage to be both wry and penetrating by turns, while ``The Last Long Letter''—an epistolary tale about a daughter sent away to meet her future groom, a boy who turns out to be visionary—is consistently bittersweet. ``A Border Incident,'' more traditional, tells of a man punished (mildly) for deserting his post to save a boy's life. Desani also offers a mock lecture (``Rudyard Kipling's Evaluation of His Own Mother'') on one of Kipling's more ludicrous compositions, and he closes with the phantasmagoric ``The Mandatory Interview of the Dean''—a madcap satire of bureaucracy and officiousness offered up in a style that is rich and frothily indulgent. A varied collection, impressive in its use of religious and personal mythology—and lushly descriptive of a sensibility and a culture that is part English, part Indian, and uniquely Desani's own.
Pub Date: May 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-929701-12-7
Page Count: 207
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
Williams's fifth novel (Slow Dance in Autumn, etc.)—a bittersweet comedy about a man who searches for the woman he loved in the Sixties—is sometimes tedious, but its familiar mix of southern argot and good-ole-boy humor, spiced this time with some religious parody, can also be clever and touching. Ford Clayton is a North Carolina music professor suffering from midlife crisis: wife Jill moves to Macon after he has an affair, and his opera, based on East of Eden, is getting nowhere. Then he sees Camille Malone, the woman he worshipped, in a documentary about the homeless; and, once the story kicks into gear (it takes a while), Ford takes off with cousin Clarence (``I'll just be like your private preacher or something''), who was ``released from prison and washed in the Blood of the Lamb at the same time,'' for Myrtle Beach, where Ford arranges to meet Camille. Interwoven are flashbacks to Ford's childhood (``First and always, there was music'') and to his life with Camille. She was a whiz at almost everything from classical piano to Sixties lit-chat; founded ``The Malone Society'' for ``Philosophico-Musico-Politico Discussion''; organized antiwar rallies; and then found religion. At Myrtle Beach, Camille—still crazy but no bag-lady—founds a new religion with Clarence and later follows Ford back to North Carolina (he becomes reconciled with his wife) to kick off ``The Test and the Text'' (their religion) with a beer rally. It flops— and Camille returns to New York while Ford sets Yeats's ``Lake Isle of Innisfree'' to music, finally achieving something, if only in a minor key. The new religion (``The Book of Mister James Durante,'' ``The Book of Baseball Statistics'') is a lot of fun, and the humor is often right-on: altogether, then, a successful version of the Sixties Novel, about people who yearn to be who they once were but settle for what they have.
Pub Date: May 15, 1991
ISBN: 1-56145-024-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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