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RAINY LAKE

Select passages of assured writing distinguish this otherwise ordinary debut novel of family drama. Danny Fillian is 11 in 1963 when her parents buy a run-down cabin rather than the pristine beach house that her architect father admires in Rainy Lake, N.J. In ensuing chapters Danny chronicles the summers up to 1970 as she, her parents, and her older brother, Bryan, settle into the summer community. Rockcastle carefully fills in gaps about the in-between months as well, creating an excessively concrete and plot-driven narrative whose action feels more planned from above than motivated by the characters' personalities. The author weaves in recurring themes but often heavily telegraphs future activity. When in 1964 Danny meets the boy who will become her first love—the bookish girl drops her copy of Jane Eyre in the water, and he retrieves it for her—the moment is played up with irritating insistence; clearly the 12-year-old will have to wait a few more chapters before they can get together. Romance has a prefabricated feel in this novel, which offers someone for everyone except Danny's parents, who grow apart as her father's drinking intensifies. In the background, the '60s are heating up and—as expected—intergenerational tension ensues. Danny's voice is occasionally startling enough to jolt the proceedings, particularly when the now-adult narrator demonstrates her maturity. Spare, quiet imagery (``Memory is a little like the rosary beads I keep wrapped up in the back of my bureau drawer'') adds impact but is too infrequent, as are Danny's flashes of humor and individuality. Her personality comes through when she saves the condom from the first time she has intercourse in the same box that harbors childhood paraphernalia like her first pair of nylons and her birthday cards, but more often she just seems stiff. No day at the beach, but not a total washout.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55597-218-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994

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THE ROAD

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

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  • Pulitzer Prize Winner


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Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.

McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006

ISBN: 0-307-26543-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006

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THINGS FALL APART

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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