A quirky, imaginative, dazzling black comedy.
Vada Prickett is dying, pinned under a stupendous stuffed bear, thinking about his short life and a fond-of-puns God enjoying the "Moon over My Hammy" breakfast at the local Denny's.
With word play sparkling and crackling across the pages, Griffith cuts and polishes his story with esoteric Bob Dylan–like references and Stephen Wright's sometimes piquant and sardonic observations. Vada, not quite 30 and "waiting … for his life to start," was helping his neighbor and best friend, Wyatt Yancey, slip one final trophy into his house before Yancey's marriage to his taxidermy-hating fiancée, Darla. Vada too loves Darla, which adds to the fun. In the minutes between bear-crush and death, Vada recalls his youth, son of a wildlife agent father and a homemaker with the moxie to use a ballpoint pen in an emergency tracheotomy. Vic Prickett's friendship with the rich and fun-loving Reid Yancey led to the Pricketts enjoying a ritzy lake-side development home near Columbia, S.C. A decent student, Vada reached his first year of college in pursuit of his dream, becoming a large-animal vet. And then his parents were killed by an errant poultry truck while hauling the household trash to the dump. Always a half-beat off in the social dance and all matters practical, Vada, sans parents, has floundered aimlessly as a "Hose Attendant" at the Caw-Caw Car Wash, domain of an admirer of Mussolini, Il Duce. Told in the third-person, the author also often addresses the reader directly: "reader, we are donkeys who pin on our own tails." The novel is a surrealistic meditation on, and a send-up of, the American dream, consumerism, God, the modern family and assorted other human foibles, complete with a semi-pro evangelical Christian baseball team, the Risen, with a mascot named "Pablo the Bible-believing Possum." Griffith's word wizardy, his facile puns, his insight into the human heart and his topsy-turvy sardonic approach make for a one-of-a-kind reading experience.
A quirky, imaginative, dazzling black comedy.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8101-5218-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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