An expertly realized novel about the redemptive power of art.
Hospital patients fight for richer lives in Cantwell’s (Rosa's Gift and Other Stories, 2013) latest novel.
Thirty-four-year-old Philip Nason is the recreational director of Riverview Hospital, situated on an island in the middle of New York’s East River. The facility is used as a long-term-care facility for chronically ill patients, many of whom are partially or completely paralyzed. Nason originally took a job there to get a worry-free, steady paycheck that would allow him to pursue his off-hours dream of writing poetry. He’s been on thin ice with the Riverview administration for some time, mainly due to his free-thinking approach to providing his patients with meaningful activities. As the novel opens, several of these patients have just staged a “supper rebellion”—upending their food trays in protest against the hospital’s tasteless fare and indifferent staff. The institution’s administrators know that Nason has read to these patients about Henry David Thoreau and civil disobedience, so they’re certain that he’s the root cause of the unrest. Riverview is a bleak place, a human junkyard offering little to the patients who end up there; the patients even refer to it as “Farewell Island.” When Nason confronts the case of alcoholic quadriplegic Clayton Thomas, he dreams of turning Riverview’s hopelessness into something more fulfilling, for both himself and the patients; specifically, he wants to help Thomas to learn how to paint by holding a brush in his mouth. The spiritually charged artwork that eventually results is revolutionary, but the more conservative elements of Riverview’s administration fight Nason and his program. Cantwell fills his well-structured, compassionate novel with convincing insider knowledge of life inside a long-term-care facility, and its many details feel memorably authentic. He avoids turning his characters into the clichéd, otherworldly innocents that often fill fiction set in hospitals. However, there’s a fair amount of rough language scattered throughout the book (“ ‘Cut the shit, and just tell me what you want,’ Clayton snapped”), and some surprisingly explicit sex scenes. Overall, however, the resulting story is ultimately uplifting, precisely because it’s not idealized.
An expertly realized novel about the redemptive power of art.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491746530
Page Count: 356
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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