by Mike Sager ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2008
Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys, 2007, etc.) bounces readers from one subnarrative to another, and his attempt to wring a...
The lives of pimps, hustlers and other “deviant” denizens crisscross and eventually intersect on the mean streets of Washington, D.C.
Jonathan Seede, reporter for the Washington Herald, wakes up one morning to find his wife and infant son have fled, perhaps because for him fatherhood has never been a high priority. To a friend he rants about his wife’s expectations that he be supportive: “ What about my needs, you know what I’m saying?...There’s no me anymore. I have ceased to exist in my own house.” Seede tries to find meaning by getting down and dirty in the drug culture of D.C. His work on a freelance piece brings him in contact with the inhabitants of the Fourteenth Street Strip. These include the Pope of Pot, who is as intellectually brilliant as he is socially maladapted (he passes out joints to those waiting in line to tour the White House); prostitutes with names like China Doll, Razor Sally and Titty Bitty; a gay social activist; a gorgeous teenage runaway (a “Korean-Lithuanian-African-American-French-Native Indian Jew with no mother”); an eccentric billionaire preoccupied with philosophical answers only a Mayan crystal skull can provide; and a cop who, refreshingly, is not cynical. Seede eventually gets rather too close to his work and begins freebasing cocaine, so you might say that his objectivity as a reporter becomes compromised. Just when he’s strung out to the max, his wife and kid reappear, and he tries to justify his behavior by claiming how “prohibition and sublimation are detrimental to a healthy life. How, if you don’t satisfy your needs…you end up with big problems.”
Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys, 2007, etc.) bounces readers from one subnarrative to another, and his attempt to wring a happy ending from these materials ultimately strikes a false note.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7048-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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by Mike Sager
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by Mike Sager
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
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
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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