With its impressive sweep and density, Clark’s work triumphantly clears the second-novel hurdle. Don’t miss it.
Big, boisterous and hugely enjoyable, Clark’s second tracks the wild ride of a disgraced preacher across an American heartland pockmarked by scams and rackets.
Two lousy kisses. That’s all it took, plus some rigged DNA, to end Joel King’s marriage and ministry. Joel, a well-liked Baptist in Roanoke, Virginia, had unfortunately exchanged kisses, on church premises, with Christy Darden, the most gorgeous, pampered, sluttish, and conniving 17-year-old in all Virginia (Clark paints her with a wicked glee). The unworldly minister has pled guilty to misdemeanor charges and done six months of jail time, little realizing he was an entrapment victim. He emerges from jail penniless, only to be served with divorce papers and Christy’s civil suit for five million, while all he has is a ride to his sister’s place in Missoula, Montana. His driver is a businessman, Edmund Brooks, a loyal member of his congregation. En route, Edmund proposes that Joel join him and his partner, a black lawyer in Las Vegas, in a scheme to defraud insurance companies. The deal hinges on “borrowing” high-priced jewelry. Joel, a good and honest man, immediately declines. In Missoula, he joins Sophie, a struggling single parent, and her small son. There, he finds two low-end jobs, but sheer economic necessity drives him to accept Edmund’s offer. What follows is a heist that goes wrong, and eventually Joel is confronted by FBI agents. Meanwhile, before their depositions, he is desperately trying to work out a deal with the utterly untrustworthy Christy. All this is as hilarious and exciting as Clark’s debut (The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, 2000); but in this “grown man’s coming-of-age story,” the author takes that caper to another level. Joel’s spiritual struggle is unremitting in a world where the black and white hats don’t divide cleanly: Edmund is a likable rogue, while Joel’s probation officer, working his own racket, is total slime.
With its impressive sweep and density, Clark’s work triumphantly clears the second-novel hurdle. Don’t miss it.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4096-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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