by Mary Woronov ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
Caught in a riptide between noir and farce, emerging as too little of either.
It’s a long drop from Warhol Factory actress Woronov’s stunning debut, Snake (2000), to these watery depths of tangled sexual congress and parental neglect—but some of her former and insouciant handling of reality survives.
Drunken Molly’s weaving through a California supermarket parking lot looking for her car as the story opens, but in order to see the car she first has to remember who she is. So her childhood within earshot of Niagara Falls comes flooding back to her in images of her intense Chinese mother running a card table at an Indian-owned casino, of her unemployed steelworker father shrinking into himself and his booze beneath his wife’s scorn, of her newfound half-brother Kenny, who shared with her his obsession of going over the Falls in a barrel. Having survived to high school, Molly (real name Mei Li) and Kenny find more to share than the barrel: she makes him her lover, while her “boyfriend” Bobby, school beefcake and quarterback, hangs around in hopes of a kiss. When Kenny presumably dies going over in his barrel at graduation, however, Bobby has his opening, marrying Molly and taking her to California, where he becomes a successful car salesman—a life change that turns her into a drunk. Coming home to Buffalo for her father’s funeral a few years later, she catches a glimpse of Kenny (who her mother believes is the angel of death), and her marriage with Bobby hits the skids. Summoned to Florida, where Mom now lives, Molly finds her in the throes of Alzheimer’s and discovers Kenny nearby—in drag. He’s always been gay, apparently, and kept busy in high school servicing the football team, Bobby included. Reeling from this revelation, Molly returns to hubby in a conciliatory mood, but even with Bobby willing their hopes are all wet.
Caught in a riptide between noir and farce, emerging as too little of either.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-85242-801-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
Share your opinion of this book
More by Mary Woronov
BOOK REVIEW
by Mary Woronov
BOOK REVIEW
by Mary Woronov
BOOK REVIEW
by Mary Woronov
by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Pulitzer Prize Winner
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Cormac McCarthy
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Chinua Achebe
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.