Deftly imagined and written, Hoover’s second novel offers an intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape.
The voices emerging from a brooding farmhouse in early-20th-century Iowa reveal its residents' secrets and desires—some expected, some less so.
Through the faceted first-person accounts of four siblings and their father, Hoover (The Quickening, 2010, etc.) delivers a lyrical, at times mysterious, and dreamy tale of family ties. Its focus is several generations of the Hess clan, headed by Jon Julius, who emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1892, staking 150 acres of Midwestern bottomland as a homestead for his wife and the six children they would have. Some 20 years later, the Hess family may seem rooted, but the demands of survival on the land are relentless, and their isolation is intensified by a dispute with neighbors, a crippling accident, and the anti-German sentiment arising from World War I. Yet Hoover’s tale is about more than the Hess' hardscrabble rural existence, moving as it does from wide open fields to the grime and toil of urban factories and overseas to the blasted wastes of Europe, all the while exploring the psychologies and complicated, sometimes unreliable, and unexpected bonds among the siblings. When two of the sisters, Esther and Myrle, disappear from the farmhouse one night, the notion of home is cracked wide open, never to be restored. Lee, the son who went to war and returned traumatized, sets off for Chicago to search for the girls but eventually returns without them. Esther’s and then Myrle’s accounts follow, overlapping yet divergent, while Hoover plays a sly hand of revelation, leaving the truth about how and why the girls escaped to emerge late and plangently.
Deftly imagined and written, Hoover’s second novel offers an intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2471-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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