A young Indian intellectual’s disillusioning experience of the —romantic— ideas that lure Westerners to the East (and vice versa) is plaintively traced in this well-wrought first novel, a compact bildungsroman graced by ironic echoes of Forster and Flaubert. Samar, a Brahmin college student who acknowledges that he has little life outside the books he compulsively reads, encounters in the city of Benares several acquaintances who, in their separate ways, begin coaxing him out of his shell. Diana West (a symbolic name, n’est ce-pas?), a moneyed Englishwoman in love with India, introduces Samar to her internationally mixed circle of friends—notably, beautiful Frenchwoman Catherine and her lover Anand, a competent (if unexceptional) sitar player. A brief trip into the mountains (inviting comparison with the Marabar Caves incident in A Passage to India) throws the inexperienced Samar and the worldly Catherine together, resulting in the loss of his innocence and of her self-confidence and devotion to Anand. Simultaneously, Samar’s cautious friendship with Ranesh, an enigmatic loner with vaguely political affiliations and perhaps ambitions, introduces him to student demonstrations and overt violence, paradoxically deepening his wish to retreat into —a simplified life and world——embodied in the quickly glimpsed figure of a farm boy tending a herd of cattle. In the novel’s muted second half, Samar is called back home by his father’s illness, wills himself to forget Catherine and the seductive allure of Benares, and begins a career as a schoolteacher—all in a long falling away from the dangers—and rewards—of a life of active involvement with other people’s enticing, intimidating imperfections. Samar’s careful withdrawal from the messes that Catherine, Ranesh, and others have made of their lives is explicitly shown to be a result both of wisdom and of cowardice. A work of admirable subtlety and high intelligence, with an unfortunately low emotional temperature. It analyzes its promising content brilliantly while dramatizing it only imperfectly.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50274-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
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