With the exception of vivid erotic scenes, this one’s a wash.
In this first novel, high-school friends Maize and Robbie attempt sex, but Robbie has much to learn about his sexual identity. They drift apart until a chance meeting brings them back together as fast friends who entrust one another with every detail of their lives.
Everything, that is, except the crush Maize had on her high-school counselor, which amounted to nil but about which she continues even as an adult to obsess. Then there was a sexual escapade with the man who conducted a college-entrance interview. Robbie’s only lapse in full disclosure is the loss of his virginity to a male college professor who turned resentful after Robbie ended it. Robbie visits his divorced father in Italy, where he wanders aimlessly and tails his father’s new woman, imagining she’s cheating on his dad. Then it’s back to New York to his internship at a paper, where he rues his underpayment and lack of respect from the staff, due, he believes, to his elevated tastes and lack of hipness. Maize, meanwhile, submits to demeaning on-the-job treatment from her abusive realtor boss while she pines for a red-headed musician co-worker. When Maize catches her boss stealing from clients, he fires her. Robbie and Maize are caricatures, filling pages with adolescent, naïve meditations on love and life, which Maize scribbles furtively in her diary while imagining the professional writer she’ll one day become. Hapless analogies provide unintentional comedy in the overall aimless text: “his amber-colored mustache furrowed and lifted like an alert.” “He was paralyzed the way someone having a stroke is suddenly paralyzed.” Robbie comes to see that his father isn’t as bad as he thought, and even his mother, bitter throughout, experiences a last-minute change of heart, but these tacked-on transformations only add false sentimentality to the mix.
With the exception of vivid erotic scenes, this one’s a wash.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-17697-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
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