Luridly decorative in its trimmings, slapdash in its plotting, and ludicrously derivative.
Hemmingson, author of four erotic novels (not reviewed), spins a neo-noir tale in which everything happens—absolutely everything—except coitus.
Ever since he got fired from his San Diego firm and disbarred, Philip Lansdale has had too little to do. Every day after his wife Tina leaves their tract home for her job, he takes his son Matthew, a budding kindergarten pyromaniac, to school, then stays home with his toddler Jessica and wonders what’s going to happen next. The answer comes in the slinky person of Cassandra Payne, a neighbor with an unlimited supply of miniskirts that cover only the first few feet of her endless legs. Even before inviting the Paynes to a barbecue he’s talked Tina into hosting to get closer to the neighbors, Lansdale has been drooling over her in conversations with his drinking buddies, ex-cop Bryan Vaughn and part-time prof David Larson. And soon after the barbecue, which Cassandra attends stag, he finds himself leaving Tina asleep in bed so that he can peer into his neighbor’s window. Even without Lansdale’s constant prophecies of doom (“Had I known how sickening and utterly disturbed my behavior would eventually become, I would’ve stopped myself right then and there”), it would be obvious that his fixation on Cassandra can’t end well. What Hemmingson brings to this familiar story is a couple of spectacularly nasty surprises, some of the most wooden dialogue you’ve ever read (“A woman knows when she is being watched by the eyes of men,” Cassandra avers), and so many borrowings from earlier genre classics, from James M. Cain to Body Heat, Blue Velvet, and Fargo, that you may feel as if you’ve been locked in a revival house for the two hours it’ll take to zip through Lansdale Agonistes.
Luridly decorative in its trimmings, slapdash in its plotting, and ludicrously derivative.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87873-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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