SaFranko (Lounge Lizard, 2007, etc.) has a talent for two-fisted, Bukowski-esque prose, but he needs a story more worthy of...
A couple’s torrid affair slowly hits the skids over money, sex and art.
The novel stars narrator Max Zajack, who’s struggling to balance go-nowhere jobs with an ambition to write great fiction in the lover-and-fighter mode of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. (The book includes a praise-soaked introduction by Dan Fante, another member of that tribe.) Max is living in a decrepit New Jersey apartment and loading trucks for a living when, one night after playing guitar in a coffee shop, he meets Olivia, an attractive literature student. Their connection is almost immediate, though their relationship is more about sex than anything else—in the early pages SaFranko’s prose is enthusiastically profane, capturing the hunger the two have for each other’s bodies. Max moves into Olivia’s apartment not long after, but it’s soon clear that Olivia has bigger issues than he can handle: She quits her classes in a fit of pique, spends money she doesn’t have on expensive clothes and is prone to screaming fits and threats that she’ll do herself in. As Olivia’s erratic behavior endangers the couple, Max struggles to find work, and many of the most entertaining set pieces have more to do with his day-job frustrations than with the titular character. Max’s gigs involve doing practically nothing at AT&T and delivering newspapers to wealthy New Jersey suburbanites, jobs that heighten the novel’s man-versus-Middle-America theme. As a narrator Max is engaging, funny and full of straight-talk, and his novel-in-progress is meant to push back against the complacency he witnesses daily. But while Max feels full-blooded, Olivia is largely a bundle of ever-escalating rage. There’s little effort to identify the root causes of her actions (scenes describing her troubled relationship with her parents are thin), so the final chapters of the novel take on a repetitive feel: Olivia does something flighty, Max attempts to reason with her, Olivia explodes. Eventually the squabbles sap the novel’s power—it, like the relationship it describes, has gone on for too long.
SaFranko (Lounge Lizard, 2007, etc.) has a talent for two-fisted, Bukowski-esque prose, but he needs a story more worthy of it.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-197919-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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