A third collection from Burgin (Private Fame, 1989; Man Without Memory, 1991), who teaches at St. Louis University and also edits the quarterly Boulevard. The protagonists of these 11 stories are lonely people who've been hurt by their pasts, and become hesitant to test the dangerous waters of new circumstances or relationships. They aren't safely anchored to the real world, or even to their own inner selves, and many are still bound, well into middle age, to elderly or deceased parents or to spouses or lovers long since gone. Burgin's prose is dreamy and meditative, and the flat rhetoric that dominates his stories often has the surely unintended effect of making his characters' idiosyncracies seem hopelessly remote from us. For example, the narrator of ``The Park,'' finding solace neither with the woman he covets nor in the fabricated beauty of the public park he compulsively visits, achieves an unspecified (and unconvincing) gratification when he meets an elderly woman and carries her groceries home for her. But what literally happens in the piece simply isn't enough to allow us entry into the character's mind and heart. A few other tales feel similarly thin, but there are several impressive successes. The fine title story shows how a withdrawn young man, afflicted by a recurring dream of floating heavenward and simply disappearing, resolves this trauma by manufacturing a ``durable memory.'' And in the haunting ``My Sister's House,'' a ``gypsy scholar,'' who has never put down roots or settled into a relationship, assesses what differing effects his parents' ``house full of secrets'' has had—on his own stunted development, as well as on his sister's contented lesbian marriage. These odd, quirky glimpses of lives lived beneath the surface or on the fringe of ``normal'' behavior only intermittently strike sparks of recognition in us. But the best of them are all too familiar and won't be easily forgotten.
Pub Date: Dec. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5745-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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
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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