Unpleasantly self-righteous characters gather accusingly around a narrator who’s awfully clueless for a shrink—though well...
A psychiatrist with a major Mom problem grapples with guilt and rage in this latest exploration of gothic family ties from McGrath (Port Mungo, 2004, etc.).
“My mother’s first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old,” Charlie Weir tells us in the opening sentence, “and I felt it was my fault.” That’s pretty much the whole bleak story right there. When his parents fought, Charlie tried to placate them; after his father left, he tried to comfort his increasingly gloomy, hard-drinking mother, while older brother Walter left him to deal with it. So of course Walter became a famous artist and Mom’s favorite. In 1979, when the main action begins, she has just died and left the family’s Upper West Side Manhattan apartment to him. Charlie gets nothing, but he has bigger problems. He’s still haunted by his failure to prevent the suicide of his brother-in-law Danny seven years ago, and by his misbegotten decision to leave his wife Agnes, Danny’s sister, in the wake of that tragedy. Danny was one of a group of Vietnam veterans Charlie was treating; after his death, Charlie made his reputation writing about post-traumatic psychiatric disorders. “We gave special emphasis to the creation of a trauma story, the detailed narrative of the emotion, the context and the meaning of trauma,” he explains—and few readers will miss the overdetermined parallel to Charlie’s own narrative. As he embarks on an affair with a woman who is obviously also Walter’s mistress, Charlie reveals with nearly every lugubrious word that his basic problem lies far deeper than guilt over Danny’s death. We might care more about his original oedipal trauma, finally revealed in the novel’s closing pages, if Charlie didn’t seem throughout to be almost as cold and obtuse as everyone is always claiming.
Unpleasantly self-righteous characters gather accusingly around a narrator who’s awfully clueless for a shrink—though well written and shrewdly perceptive, as always, this isn’t one of McGrath’s more compelling efforts.Pub Date: April 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4166-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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