Crooke gives radioactive potency to Stephen’s many false steps, and they may well cook his newly reformed goose.
Crooke offers a dark tale of alcoholism, recklessness and the less-attractive aspects of the 1960s as they played out one long-ago summer in the beach town of Montauk, N.Y.
Narrator Stephen Dahl returns to Montauk, on the eastern end of Long Island, after an absence of some three decades to attend the funeral of an old friend. It’s not an easy return. Montauk was where he drank himself to oblivion on more nights than he can remember, if he remembers those nights at all. The portrayal of alcoholism here is scorching and grim and rises off the page like poisonous fumes. Stephen is now on the wagon, and with the aid of his old lover, Alexis Jordan–who ultimately dumped Stephen, thanks mostly to the booze, and took up with his old pal Tom Westlake, now deceased–he revisits his sodden behavior that summer. Some serious dirty laundry emerges slowly and gratifyingly by Crooke, who is a good hand at quietly trolling hints and insinuations before the reader, then letting them pop like a jack-in-the-box. Along the way, Crooke has Stephen explore how his behavior reflected the drearier byproducts of the counterculture: the “dead end of celebrity, simplistic religion, crackpot political theories, and economic binges and hangovers.” Stephen is calling himself to take honest account of grave mistakes, and the metaphor’s embrace reaches all the way to the ruinous, fear-fueled adventurism of American foreign policy. These various and disparate critiques have the potential of being forced upon one another, but here they have a canny, house-of-mirrors quality, bouncing and echoing before taking their place in the puzzle. Only rarely does Crooke overreach–of a Montauk “at the end of the road where time was suspended and all bets were off,” which is more sound than substance–for his writing has a natural sense of timing; the threads of the story come together with ease and deep discomfort.
Crooke gives radioactive potency to Stephen’s many false steps, and they may well cook his newly reformed goose.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-70254-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
© Copyright 2025 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.
