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SCAR TISSUE

This often clinically detailed novel from Ignatieff (Asya, 1991; Blood and Belonging, p. 115) mourns a beloved parent and addresses various kinds of loss: of memory, of faith in conventional medicine, and of pieties. Narrated by the younger son, a philosophy professor, the novel, short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize, is a personal search for answers to the big questions as well as those smaller mysteries that dog even the happiest families. The mother, now afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, was, in her prime, a woman of spirit, an artist who painted portraits, liked to go barefoot, and sang old Broadway songs as she worked. The father, an immigrant from Odessa, is a scientist with his own legacy, less lethal than his wife's genetic inheritance, but no less vitiating—a childhood that was never safe. And those fears have shaped his relationship with his two sons, who resented his apparent lack of imagination and his emphasis on having ``a profession and a pension.'' As his mother nears 60, the narrator observes puzzling changes in her: She no longer paints, and she has difficulty expressing herself—the long, wrenching decline into silence and nothingness has begun. His own marriage breaks down as he becomes obsessively involved in his mother's care. The elder brother, a neurophysician, appears to be more detached, but it's only a protective mechanism, and while their father's death brings the two brothers closer together, it doesn't really help the narrator. As he struggles to find some meaning in his mother's life, his own, and even in the disease (which he suspects he has inherited), he comes to believe that there is a ``pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can comprehend.'' Disease not as a metaphor but as a prescription for living in a book that confronts our worst fears with bracing insight and finely tuned emotion. A tough read but worth it.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-374-25428-1

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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MAGIC HOUR

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

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