Despite an eerily captivating villain in the person of Dick Dart, an ultimately tedious odyssey—unredeemed by its quixotic...
A plucky heroine is forced to distinguish between literary illusion and existential reality in this murky sins-of-the-father metafiction from Straub (The Throat, 1993, etc.).
Vaguely discontented with her marriage to a 40-year-old manchild named Davey, ten years her junior, Nora Chancel (who served as a frontline nurse during the Vietnam War) resolves to turn their lives around. Barring the way to any immediate breakaway, however, is Alden, her domineering father-in-law and head of the publishing house that employs Davey. Along with several generations of devoted readers, moreover, Davey is mesmerized by Night Journey, an allusive allegory whose perennial bestseller status has sustained the family firm down through the years. Meanwhile, the brutal murders of four well-to-do divorcées and widows (all in their middle or late 40s) rock the upscale Connecticut exurb in which the Chancels all reside. The culprit turns out to be Dick Dart, a local attorney and former classmate of Davey's at Yale. A remorseless and resourceful monster with a wealth of grievances, Dart soon escapes from the town jail with Nora in tow. The fugitive, who's been killing off clients to undermine his father's law practice, is also pursuing a brand-new agenda: to prove that Hugo Driver, the long-dead author of Night Journey, did not actually write the book. Though on the run through backcountry New England, he and Nora manage to gather a considerable amount of testimony in support of his thesis. The final proofs are unearthed at a sometime writers' colony, where Nora wastes the sporadically charming but consistently vicious Dart in a climactic and bloody confrontation. After a hellish ten-day journey, then, she returns home to dump hapless Davey—and put paid to Chancel House.
Despite an eerily captivating villain in the person of Dick Dart, an ultimately tedious odyssey—unredeemed by its quixotic quests for the truth about times long past.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-40137-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
IN THE NEWS
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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