Poet Blumenthal, former director of Creative Writing at Harvard, lampoons that university's hallowed halls and the oddballs who roam them in his fictional debut—a lascivious and witty but all-too-entre-nous and familiar tale of academic life. Martin Weinstock is a thirtysomething Jewish poet who receives the call to teach at Harvard, a proof of his having arrived in the literary world that he greets with profound ambivalence. Convinced after a short time in residence that the institution and his colleagues are far more interested in celebrating the dead than in supporting the living, Martin finds his childhood fears of death and betrayal resurfacing with a vengeance. Born to poor Israeli parents who decided to stay on in America, he was traded as an infant to his childless aunt and uncle in exchange for a chicken farm in New Jersey, then raised as his foster parents' son without being told of the switch until his ``mother'' died, to be replaced by a bitter widow who made life intolerable. Unsure of love and his identity as a youth, he shuns commitment like the plague in Cambridge—although he never fails to rise to temptations offered by his students and eligible others. Martin's willful descent into existential quagmires and indecisiveness ends finally on a junket to Ecuador, where he meets the sensitive, artistic Beatrice, who guides him back to the living by bearing his son and who gives him the courage to confront the accumulated miseries of Harvard and his past. With nods to Dante, Philip Roth, and a host of others, this is cultured and pleasantly satirical—but for all its psychological insight, it still lacks consistency, proving an unstable mix of deep family traumas and hip Harvard-bashing.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-944072-34-8
Page Count: 318
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
BOOK REVIEW
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