Subjective memoir about film reviewer Haskell's emotions when her Film reviewer husband Andrew Sarris is felled by a near-fatal rare disease and becomes the sickest person ever seen in New York Hospital who lived. Many will admire Haskell's knack for wringing every emotive droplet from a vast thunderhead. One gives up early to her endless diversions or else finds oneself locked into an excruciating reading experience of walleyed pages that seem like nothing so much as reportorial space-filling Never mind that all the stuffing—the whole emotional webbing of her life, of her parental ties, her ties to her husband's family, her personal friendships (nobody seems left out), workplace friends, friends in the hospital—proves magnetized to her "love" theme. One cries GET ON WITH IT! But no—it's surrender to what she herself terms "neurotic" and sounds like free association, much of it in the jargon of a lapsed 70's feminist. In the end she admits that she's leaving Andy's version of his illness to himself—it's his material. And she is accustomed not only to living in her adored husband's shadow, but also in having his fabulous film-brain and knockout intuitive powers at her disposal. But here she's on her own, and recapturing square-handed signals of despair. Andy's illness is undiagnosable. Operation follows operation. A colostomy, ugh! Infections create big new illnesses. He's dying He's paranoid—for months! She can't connect with him. What's worse, her mother, who has never connected with Andy, can't connect with her. And Andy's mother is a mess, seemingly taking on his illness and suddenly coming down with something like Alzheimer's disease. The bills are colossal. For the first time in her childless marriage, Molly attempts to sort out the household finances and is staggered. Close friends die by the handful. And WHAT'S WRONG WITH ANDY? He's such a multilayered mystery, with so many bugs and breakdowns, that by the time he miraculously recovers the final diagnosis is Kafkaesque makeshift. Many strong clinical passages will carry this with most readers, who may well warm to the love theme too and find Haskell's method daring.
Pub Date: April 19, 1990
ISBN: 0595140408
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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