Plodding, programmatic memoir-fiction—about a father who is never quite successful financially but who leaves a lasting impression on his writerly son—that nonetheless deserves respect for its single-minded, dissertation-like affection. Despite the undistinguished prose, we come to care for the old man. The story begins on an Ohio farm where narrator Bo, a junior in high school, lives with his father, Marcus Northway, a man in his early 40s. Bo tries to write stories while father and mother (Louise) come to understand that rich Aunt Ida left them no money in her will. The father is no hero, then, but a grumpy misfit who lives with half his brain in the clouds. By the time Bo graduates, the father's career ``had ceased to follow an ascending arc and began to take on a zigzag....'' He loses his vice-presidency—he was a ``television pioneer'' who missed the boat—and eventually resigns from the station where he works to become a salesman. Bo narrates such decline, experiences the death of Grandpa Luke, and attends his father's college—as readers, we receive the dubious benefits of dorm-room debates, Marcus's visit to campus, and a visiting poet's residency: ``He had the most incredible voice and accent. His words were thick and seemed drowned in whiskey....'' Throughout, the father remains a cross between Willy Loman (``That's it, Bo, the crucial thing. Enthusiasm!'') and a more successful purveyor of the American Dream. Bo quits college, marries, and writes ad copy while his father first succeeds with a franchise for ``a method of salesmanship'' but then, after unsuccessful surgery for Parkinson's, declines and ends up in a nursing home, where he dies with his loving wife still looking after him. The narrator of the memoir reflects that ``By now I am approaching his age then.'' The second in Terry's Northway series (Tom Northway, 1968): sweet-natured but, in the end, a merely personal account.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1992
ISBN: 0-89672-274-0
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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