A startling, mordantly funny portrait of contemporary Britain, and Drabble's (The Gates of Ivory, 1992, etc.) best and most assured novel in years. At the heart of the action is Frieda Palmer, the increasingly eccentric matriarch of an eminently successful family. Frieda has gained fame for her eloquent, prophetic works on feminism (including The Matriarchy of War); her children are also variously successful: Gogo is a much-in-demand neurologist, married to an up- and-coming liberal politician; Rosemary is an influential figure in arts funding; and Daniel is a quietly accomplished barrister. The three, their spouses, and their children have gathered, as the story begins, to discuss what, if anything, can be done with their intemperate mother. She has recently engaged in a buffoonish battle with the government over taxes. And she has sold the family house, and bought a rambling, shabby hotel in Exmoor, on a cliff above the sea, where she lives alone. What will she do next? What of their reputations? And what of their inheritance? Their efforts to somehow assert control over Frieda's life eventually draw in their own children (including the free-spirited Emily, Daniel's daughter, and the brilliant, somber young Ben, Gogo's son) and set in motion a variety of subplots revealing the quiet hypocrisies at the heart of many of these lives and offering, in the person of Frieda, one of the more complex and original of Drabble's creations. A zestful, angry figure, fighting age, and struggling to come to terms with the horrific secret concerning her own marriage that she has long suppressed, Frieda, often fierce, arouses exasperation and affection in equal measure. This droll riff on King Lear manages to be both an intriguing portrait of a difficult woman and a sustained lampoon on the self-absorbed, righteous behavior of the British elite, related in prose of sustained vigor. Satire and melodrama, nicely mixed, and a thoroughly satisfying entertainment.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100363-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
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