So tiny a book, so wee its little steps—yet so devastatingly large in its subject, import, and effect. A 20-minute novel...
Asher (Shelter, 1986), editor in chief of Vintage Books, offers up a `novel` that may be the tiniest tome to date that wryly ponders (if pondering be a task so briefly doable) the woe that is in living.
In 101 teeny `chapters,` none more than a paragraph and some just a line or two—all accompanied by designer Chip Kidd's witty combinings of nostalgia for and satire of life the way it used to be and at the same time of and for life as known from the comix—Asher follows his nameless but profoundly typical baby boomer from birth to—well, to emptiness, breakdown, and death. The boomer `was born on a Friday`; once cut his finger almost off with his father's razor; once `stole quarters from his mother's purse` (`she screamed at him` and `he wondered if he would go to hell. It felt exciting`); and `from the first day . . . loved school.` College will go okay, bringing with it first sex; while afterward the boomer `got a good job in a large company. He rented a small walk-up apartment. A woman gave him a cat.` Marriage will follow (to the woman who gave him the cat), then a son, promotions at work, a move to the suburbs—and afterward the rest, better discovered by the reader. Let it be said only that amid the riches of an outwardly successful life, and before the close of same, will also occur the drinking of Scotch, the taking of Valium, the seeing of psychiatrists, an emergence from a closet, and, among the least, yet far from least, the therapeutic walking of the dog, this drolly captured by a Tristram Shandy–esque page filled with a confusion of many dog-print and many person-prints.
So tiny a book, so wee its little steps—yet so devastatingly large in its subject, import, and effect. A 20-minute novel that, amazingly, really is one.Pub Date: May 24, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-41009-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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