A too-perfect protagonist stifles this story’s energy.
In Oppitz’s (The Green Monster, 2011) novel, a young man finds an unusual calling as a river guide.
Robbie Oliver Jasper seems to have everything that he could want—he’s wealthy, handsome, and athletic, and he has a genius-level intellect, a photographic memory, and a promised place in Kansas State University’s veterinary program. However, he isn’t happy, as he feels controlled by his mother and father, who frequently ignore his opinions. Following his high school graduation, he and his parents decide to try to reconnect by taking a canoe trip on the Rio Grande. Just as they start to mend their relationship, a freak flood overturns their boats, and both of Robbie’s parents drown and get washed away. But Robbie is saved by a man named ST, a professional river guide. The teenager finds that he envies ST’s freedom, so he decides to become a river rat himself. Taking the nickname “ROJ,” he joins ST’s group and learns their skills on the very same body of water where his parents died. As he guides his own clients, he provides them with business advice that many find compelling. When someone from Robbie’s hometown arrives in search of him, he must decide how his old and new lives fit together. This novel provides readers a good understanding of the life of a river guide as well as a strong argument for the benefits of a simple life. However, the main character’s implausibility makes it difficult to take the story seriously. Robbie, who speaks in stilted dialogue, comes off as overly adult; he also has the uncanny ability to convince adults to do his bidding, as when he tells a Park Service officer of his river-rat plans: “Judd, I have you to thank for all this to happen....If anyone inquires about me or my whereabouts, tell them I am out of touch for the time being.” He’s never shown to have any flaws, and his varied expertise and abilities seem almost superhuman, particularly for a teenager. As a result, there’s no sense that Robbie really develops as a character.
A too-perfect protagonist stifles this story’s energy.Pub Date: July 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-3502-3
Page Count: 356
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The fine Israeli writer Yehoshua (Open Heart, 1996, etc.) makes a lengthy journey into the year 999, the end of the first millennium. Indeed, it is the idea of a great journey that is the heart of the story here. Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant has come a long distance to France to seek out his nephew and former partner Abulafia. Ben Attar, the nephew, and a third partner, the Muslim Abu Lutfi, had once done a lucrative business importing spices and treasures from the Atlas Mountains to eager buyers in medieval Europe. But now their partnership has been threatened by a complex series of events, with Abulafia married to a pious Jewish widow who objects vehemently to Ben Attar’s two wives. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, whose cleverness is belied by his seeming ineffectualness; the rabbi’s young son, Abu Lutfi; the two wives; a timorous black slave boy, and a crew of Arab sailors, the merchant has come to Europe to fight for his former partnership. The battle takes place in two makeshift courtrooms in the isolated Jewish communities of the French countryside, in scenes depicted with extraordinary vividness. Yehoshua tells this complex, densely layered story of love, sexuality, betrayal and “the twilight days, [when] faiths [are] sharpened in the join between one millennium and the next” in a richly allusive, languorous prose, full of lengthy, packed sentences, with clauses tumbling one after another. De Lange’s translation is sensitively nuanced and elegant, catching the strangely hypnotic rhythms of Yehoshua’s style. As the story draws toward its tragic conclusion—but not the one you might expect—the effect is moving, subtle, at once both cerebral and emotional. One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-48882-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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