A dark, grand, sweeping dream of a book.
The lulling beauty of Hawaii proves a troubling soporific for a quiet and once-promising teenager.
Johnson’s debut is not only remarkably assured but astonishingly fresh, one that refuses to trade in the usual hoary high-school clichés. Loren Foster moved from Boston to Maui six years ago with his dentist dad so that he could set up his own practice. Now they live alone in a massive house that they probably can’t afford, the too-big yard proving a jungle-like adversary that must be battled constantly (this is a naturalistic piece of work in which the island itself is as much a character as any of the humans). Loren goes to high school, though even years after arriving, he doesn’t seem to have quite adjusted. His friends are few and the best one he has, an inveterate social chameleon named Shane, often completely ignores him; the one thing they used to share, going night fishing, they’re doing less and less, though it figures prominently in Loren’s dreams. Things change, though, when Shane introduces Loren to a band of druggies who indulge in petty crimes to get the cash for their fixes. At this stage, the straight-laced Loren starts slipping: falling asleep in class, blowing off his father, wandering through the warm tropical days in a haze. What really stands out about Johnson’s work is not his tale of Loren’s growing antisocial tendencies, but the manner in which it is transformed into something greater. The artwork is truly something to behold, its dramatic and transformative lines recreating the island’s lush modernity with a sensual power. Panels are shuffled together with a cinematic flair that highlights the florid emotions of adolescence far better than any battery of melodrama could.
A dark, grand, sweeping dream of a book.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56097-719-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
A slim novel, both in its emotion and construction, set in 1972, centering on a family coming to grips with the death of a son and the closing of their small town’s factory. The Vietnam War is gradually ending and Watergate is heating up, but these two giant events in US history serve only as backdrop to the personal anguish of the MacLeans. When 18-year-old Cory dies in a summer-job mining accident, the family unravels at the loss of their golden boy—blatantly the favorite son, popular, good, and college bound. Cory’s death leaves a hole in the family that older brother Mike and younger brother Stephan feel compelled, yet unable, to fill. The black sheep of the family, Mike drifts from one low-paying job to the next; after work, he spends his time barroom brawling, or fighting with his bitter father. Stephan, still in school, wants to be a musician, although now, with Cory’s passing, he feels the pressure to take the straight and narrow to college, to live out the life that Cory lost. Add to this the disenchantment of parents Bud and Lola, laid off when the bottle factory closed down, and the tale provides fertile ground for examining the failure of the American Dream. This slow-moving effort, however, just scratches the surface, shifting from one landscape-focused event to another, rarely exploring the emotional terror that lurks within each character. Nieman offers some gemlike observations—the desperation of the town slut, holiday shopping at the local department store, Bud’s frustration at being retrained in computers—but she can—t quite sustain a storyline that refuses to progress. The bleak ending, derived from a lack of resolution, is in a sense admirable, and true to the resignation the characters hold for the future; it also reinforces, though, the lack of movement that defines the rest of the narrative. A potentially powerful work that fails itself through lack of focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9657639-6-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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