Written on ice cubes in 86-proof ink. Quite amusing. And as perishable as the rock classics Pete reveres.
This time out, Lindquist (Carnival Desires, 1990, etc.) gives us Jane Austen in reverse.
Ex-grunge star Pete Tyler’s Seattle rock band fell apart eight years ago, and since then he’s become a lawyer. Now, at 36 and after sex with some 300 women, he wants to marry. Like the deal-making screenwriter in Carnival who wanted to leave the scene after too many “club sluts,” wifeless Pete floats through his days on raw unfiltered Camels and shots of Johnnie Walker while fearing the fast approach of age 40. Women still see some glamour, but not much, in the rock-star manqué, while at the moment Pete’s become page-one news in Seattle for prosecuting local rock guitarist Keith Johnson, a.k.a. Keith Junior, for the date rape of 19-year-old Amber Nickerson. Seattle is famed for its pickup rock bands, and Pete is still up to his follicles in rock, measuring every minute of the day against tunes and lyrics finely detailed throughout the story. He longs for the girl who got away 12 years ago, Beth Keller, whom he hasn’t seen since. He’s deep with a stripper named Winter, bright but not exactly marrying stuff, and has just taken up with Sub Pop A&R executive Esmé, to whose label Keith is signed. The novel’s big lift doesn’t come until Pete’s heavy-drinking assistant prosecutor, Scott, enters and starts spouting first-rate cynical witticisms like a Seattle Oscar Wilde: “The whole retro thing. You might be on the cutting edge with this marriage idea. It’s making a comeback . . . —marriage, adultery, promiscuity, alcoholism, Sinatra, the things that made this a great country.” And so Pete staggers in search of “the curative sensation of human contact” and “the redemptive power of passion.” Fruitlessly.
Written on ice cubes in 86-proof ink. Quite amusing. And as perishable as the rock classics Pete reveres.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-46302-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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