The line between comedy and tragedy is thin. This one swings hard but misses.
A professional tennis player learns just how hard the ball bounces.
After gathering much praise for his first novel, Brown (Floodmarkers, 2009) fails to bring his A-game to this muddled, melancholic follow-up about a professional athlete. The protagonist and narrator, Slow Smith, was once one of the best tennis players in the world, a doubles champion with a 148-mile-per-hour serve and a faithful partner in his hell-raising childhood pal, Kaz. But 23 years later, Slow is a ghost of his former self, taking charity gigs in the wake of the terrible car accident that put his pregnant wife Anne in a coma. Once Slow learns that Kaz was sleeping with his wife, he starts to go a bit bonkers. In a rare opportunity for original humor, Slow challenges Kaz to a duel but recants. Wallowing in his worsening misery, he drinks too much, canoodles with two former classmates and makes jarring, dichotomous declarations that disrupt the flow of an already prickly story. “I felt alive, dangerous. Free,” he says during a legendary hangover. Later, “I am a barbarian.” Only during Slow’s visits to Anne does his true nature emerge. Every day, Slow takes a Polaroid of his wife, maintaining her own habit of photographing him. “They all looked like someone who had at one point been my wife, had once been alive, had once kissed me and started to cry because she was afraid I wouldn’t love her as much once the baby was born.” While Brown clearly has a gift for language, the caustic dejection of his main man overwhelms the book’s black humor, and Slow’s potentially redemptive return to the sporting world is virtually an afterthought. By the time Anne is resurrected from her deep sleep, it’s difficult to see what she ever might have seen in Slow, even in the ghostly echo of a thousand photographs.
The line between comedy and tragedy is thin. This one swings hard but misses.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-507-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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