Well-written though oft-told, and interrupted much too often by a confused spirituality.
Jan Campbell is an excellent student and devoted churchgoer—until she scandalizes the Baptist congregation by saying “nobody should hold a child back from God. . . .”
Aunt Ada agrees in principle, though she’s never uttered more than a quiet amen in church. Jan loves to listen to Ada’s stories of life in rural Mississippi, before the family migrated to the mostly black Chicago suburb they live in now. Her father Charles, a plainspoken dirt farmer down south, isn’t quite good enough for her mother Jessie, who used to work as a hired glamour girl, distracting the marks in a cardsharp’s traveling game. None of this makes much sense to Jan, who listens for answers in the bittersweet lyrics of jazz singers and grows up wondering about the mysteries of life—and love. Her first lover is Don Obatunde, who grew up in the projects with his heroin-addict mother, turned to crime at a young age, and became a sculptor in jail. Upon his release, wealthy white women helped get his work into galleries and shows, and Don showed his thanks by bedding them all. When Jan discovers that he’s involved with another woman, she thinks how nice it would be if she could commune with the family spirits. Her long-dead grandmother Hannah is waiting, but Jan can’t hear her words of advice (yet). Though Hannah’s “earth time” is over, her spirit moves freely between this world and the Hereafter, offering wise counsel in a woo-woo language that doesn’t sound like anything from Mississippi (it’s noted that Hannah is part Cherokee, as if to explain the cryptic comments). Eventually, Jan lands a great job at a jazz station, and, having gotten a new love, responsible Phil, figures out that the voice she hears in her head doesn’t mean she’s crazy—just communing with family ghosts.
Well-written though oft-told, and interrupted much too often by a confused spirituality.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-75809-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
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