The public death of Walter Mitty, alias Norman Mailer, (alias, wishfully speaking anyway, Jack Kennedy), represented by the concoction, recently serialized in Esquire, now hard-covered, bearing the title, An American Dream, bearing also the same relationship to An American Tragedy as spitballs might be said to bear to the atom bomb, is herewith reviewed. In the colloquial sense, of course, let it be stated there is no greater bomb than Dream (probably the least controversial statement of the year), which novel in its virtuoso inanity, its superlative suggestiveness, resembles, a. the unannounced second volume of Dwight MacDonald's Parodies, b. Ayn Rand discovering Freud, c. Mickey Spillane after reading Sade. The hero, Bogart re-fashioned like Paul Newman, is drenched by the Nouvelle Vague, a high-life burrower. He is also "professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation," as well as Genet-in-diapers insights ("...and I looked deeper into the eyes in the mirror as if they were keyholes... and asked myself, 'Am I now good? Am I evil forever'"). He murders his celebrity wife, runs through cat-and-mouse reels with the fuzz, bed-and-bounce deals with the broads, while his father-in-law, mysterious interlocutor of the Jet Set, CIA and the Mafia, closes in for the finale. A vaudeville liebestod, melange of eros, power and kitsch, signalizing the complete loss of control of its author. "Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;/ Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;/ What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?," asked Yeats, who never read Norman Mailer.
Pub Date: March 15, 1965
ISBN: 0375700706
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
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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