of America's failure to slow down and smell the roses, whatever color they may be.
A hideous home-brewed housepaint has unpredictable consequences for the daft residents of a small Ohio town that’s preparing for its annual tourist event, in this second midwestern gothic from Levandoski (Going to Chicago, 1997).
Lawyer D. William Aitchbone, aspiring Republican power-broker of tiny Tuttwyler, Ohio, will let nothing stop him from making this summer's Squaw Days festival the best ever. As the festival's new chairman, Aitchbone (who sees the festival as a launching pad for his political career) is yanking every string he can grab to have the US vice president ride in the annual parade and possibly even judge the pie-eating and tobacco-spitting contests. But should a vice president have to see the drab, unpainted two-story clapboard house of Howard Dornick, the illegitimate son of the town's only war hero? Aitchbone decides to threaten Dornick, the city's maintenance man, with job privatization; as a result, Dornick buys the cheapest paint he can find, mixes in assorted household cleaning fluids, lubricating oils and antifreeze, and slathers on an eye-searing shade of green that contrasts violently with the prim, pearly white Victorians facing the town square. Levandoski's deliberately trite metaphor for the shock of the new has residual effects: spinster librarian Katherine Hardihood falls in love with Dornick and, during a visit to the festival (a tacky sham that celebrates the murder of an Indian princess and her child by Tuttwyler’s founding fathers, and the princess's ghostly forgiveness of the crime), clinically depressed New York commercial color-consultant Hugh Harbinger sees gold in what he trademarks as Serendipity Green. From here on, Levandoski takes his farce down paths less familiar—and less assured. We learn that the town's conflicted personalities are linked to a motormouth Iranian psychiatrist, Pirooz Aram; that a melodramatic secret lurks in a forgotten grave; and that an assassin lurks among the parade’s cheering sightseers. A funny, if formulaic, send-up of heartland hypocrisy slowly ripens into a more interesting but less coherent observation
of America's failure to slow down and smell the roses, whatever color they may be.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57962-063-9
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
