A first collection of 20 stories tries to make black humor out of macabre jokes, surreal grotesqueries, and the underbelly of life. While a few succeed, transforming seaminess into blue-collar blues, most fall flat—wet dreams and nightmares not yet shaped sufficiently. The title story, written in three parts, is typical. In the first part, Bill (``no marriage, no job'') loiters through his life until he finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time— holding a spent shotgun after happening upon a convenience-store murder—and gets blown away by the cops; in the second section, written in uncapitalized modified stream-of-consciousness, a drunk Vietnam vet beats up his daughter, causing his wife to leave him, whereupon the vet retreats to his basement and takes potshots at cops until, surrounded, he kills himself; the last part is written in black dialect, another take on the underside of life. Too often such material is delivered in an unexceptional style and the dialogue fails to ring true, but Christian has a flair for overlaying his modern bombed-out world with an effective futuristic patina: ``The place [convenience store] was manned by people who spoke in a barely intelligible modern dialect...The prototype of a new language. A language to be used when humans lived in metal spheres buried beneath the blasted surface of the world.'' Some of the pieces, in fact, have a Rod Serling-like twist: in ``The Mobile,'' a sculptor noted for such masterworks as ``Roadkill'' (``a mobile constructed of the animal carcasses he had collected'') arranges for a customer (and ex-lover) to pick up his latest piece: himself, hanging dead from a rope in his studio. That sort of thing has a certain punch to it, but as a collection, this one—despite some fine gritty detail and several sharp portraits of the down-and-out or the merely mean—too soon punches itself out.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-922820-16-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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