FOGTOWN

Name: FOGTOWN
Author: Peter Plate
ISBN: 1-58322-639-7

by Peter Plate ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2004

Strong ending—but we saw it before, in René Clair’s Le Million, wasn’t it, with franc notes blowing wildly all over Paris?

bookshelf

The Literary Laureate of San Francisco (The Angels of Catastrophe, 2001, etc., none reviewed) focuses largely on Frisco’s gritty Mission district and its grimy lowlifes.

The greasy morning haze over the district might be what TS Eliot calls the objective correlative for Plate’s characters, like melancholy Hamlet’s black suit, though Plate never makes this match-up with his morally fogbound parolees and drug dealers. He employs an inspired fairy-tale hook to compel the reader to hang on despite thin plotting and at times even thinner writing (What’s wrong with these sentences?: “Holding the money in her palsying hands, the paper shimmered in the daylight”; “Clad in a polyester imitation sarong and an orange suede halter-top, her hair was dyed bright cadmium yellow”), while every paragraph thuds with the passive voice in deadening strings of “was” and “were.” The hook: a Ford Taurus careens onto Market Street and overturns a Brinks armored truck carrying perhaps $3 million. The bloodied guards lie unconscious while sacks of brand-new $100 dollar bills fall from the open doors and strewn bills whip about in the breeze (is it a breezy fog?). Mama Celeste, 80 and religious, just rebuffed at the Social Security office, finds herself standing amid bills, hides a linen Brinks sack under her coat, and hauls it to her room at the rock-bottom Allen Hotel, where she loses count of her take but thinks it may be a million. So she fills a shoebox with a hundred grand and goes out, as God’s messenger, to give to the poor and needy, many of them lying on the streets like spent condoms or cigar wrappers. Also at the Allen: parolee Stiv Wilkins, 25, whose itch to burgle runs as deep as Jean Genêt’s. He, his wife, and baby face eviction; he owes a paranoid black drug dealer, and is in deep merde with his psyche, seeing Mexican ghosts everywhere.

Strong ending—but we saw it before, in René Clair’s Le Million, wasn’t it, with franc notes blowing wildly all over Paris?

Pub Date: June 7, 2004

ISBN: 1-58322-639-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Seven Stories

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

bookshelf

An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SUMMER WE CROSSED EUROPE IN THE RAIN
by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

- BOOK REVIEW
KLARA AND THE SUN
by Kazuo Ishiguro

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BURIED GIANT
by Kazuo Ishiguro

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘Never Let Me Go’ Series in the Works at FX

- AWARDS
Shortlists for TikTok Book Awards Are Revealed

bookshelf

ABSOLUTE POWER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1996

bookshelf

The mother of all presidential cover-ups is the centerpiece gimmick in this far-fetched thriller from first-novelist Baldacci, a Washington-based attorney. In the dead of night, while burgling an exurban Virginia mansion, career criminal Luther Whitney is forced to conceal himself in a walk-in closet when Christine Sullivan, the lady of the house, arrives in the bedroom he's ransacking with none other than Alan Richmond, President of the US. Through the one-way mirror, Luther watches the drunken couple engage in a bout of rough sex that gets out of hand, ending only when two Secret Service men respond to the Chief Executive's cries of distress and gun down the letter-opener-wielding Christy. Gloria Russell, Richmond's vaultingly ambitious chief of staff, orders the scene rigged to look like a break-in and departs with the still befuddled President, leaving Christy's corpse to be discovered at another time. Luther makes tracks as well, though not before being spotted on the run by agents from the bodyguard detail. Aware that he's shortened his life expectancy, Luther retains trusted friend Jack Graham, a former public defender, but doesn't tell him the whole story. When Luther's slain before he can be arraigned for Christy's murder, Jack concludes he's the designated fall guy in a major scandal. Meanwhile, little Gloria (together with two Secret Service shooters) hopes to erase all tracks that might lead to the White House. But the late Luther seems to have outsmarted her in advance with recurrent demands for hush money. The body count rises as Gloria's attack dogs and Jack search for the evidence cunning Luther's left to incriminate not only a venal Alan Richmond but his homicidal deputies. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax provides an unsurprising answer to the question of whether a US president can get away with murder. For all its arresting premise, an overblown and tedious tale of capital sins. (Film rights to Castle Rock; Book-of-the-Month selection)