Inman (Old Dogs and Children, 1991, etc.) returns with another small-town southern tale, this time focusing on a boy's coming of age during the late '70s. Young Trout Mosely has to move back to Mosely, Georgia, a company town named after his grandfather, when his mother, Irene, suddenly checks into an Atlanta psychiatric facility. Trout's father, Joe Pike, an ex-football player and Methodist preacher, goes off the deep end as well, refurbishing an old Triumph motorcycle and roaring toward Texas, mouthing homely platitudes about the Good Lord's intentions. Joe Pike is forcibly transferred back to the Methodist Church in Mosely, where his sermons astound his sister, matriarch of the dying mill, and amuse an older brother, a whiskey-besotted ex-spy named Phinizy who's come home to die. There's also an embittered, handicapped girl who was run over by a Mosely truck when she was four; she and Trout get jobs at the Dairy Queen, where together they puzzle over the flaws and foibles of their parents and do some growing up. Joe Pike comes in, occasionally, to slurp Blizzards and meditate out loud on the Dairy Queen as the center of the universe. In addition, Inman introduces a canny local sheriff, a gay cousin in Atlanta, and sundry other colorful types, and, sometimes, his blend of humor, sorrow, and down-home charm makes for a touching evocation of growing up. More often, though, Inman seems to have taken on too much and can't satisfactorily work it all out. When Trout heads off on his dad's Triumph to visit his mother, his adventures on the road seem contrived. Worse, his mother, when he finally sees her, has no wisdom to communicate. Worse still, Joe Pike never pulls himself together and, in the end, is just more pathetic than tragic. Inman's likable tone and command of his settings aren't enough to redeem his overloaded story, which winds down into a forced, unsatisfying conclusion.
Pub Date: March 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-41873-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Canin's return to short fiction should be a cause for welcome- -yet isn't, disappointingly. In four adipose, rhetorical, quite forced long stories, he continues—as in his unfortunate last book, the novel Blue River (1991)—to strive for ``wise'' adult tonalities. But these rich, deep voices all but neglect the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge that made Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), remarkable—turning him into a writer who builds high, fussy, false ceilings without walls to support them. Upon an unstartling theme—that we repeat as adults what we do as children- -each story here plays out a variation. In the baldest, the title piece, a powerful captain of industry still is moved to impress his elderly prep-school teacher with his temerity and moral sleaze. In ``Accountant,'' an old friend's later-life success throws a careful man to the edge of his rectitude. In ``City of Broken Hearts,'' a middle-aged father learns something about trust and love from his college-aged son. And in ``Batorsag and Szerelem,'' a boy observes in his elder genius brother what seem like signs of schizophrenia but are instead sexual misapprehensions. It's here that the book is most ragged but also most genuine-seeming: the younger boy has available to him an X-raying psychology no grown-up character in Canin ever does (Canin must be the ultimate ``kid-brother'' writer)—and it's frustrating that this quicksilver perceptiveness is given so little play in the stories, which are bulked-up instead with grown-up characters that are invariably slow, large, and overwide. The stories thus always seem to be wearing their parent's clothes—an effect that reaches into the prose itself, a simulacrum of Cheeverian and Peter Tayloresque modulation that in Canin's hands is just pomp and circumstance.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41962-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.
Brooks combines her penchant for historical fiction (Year of Wonders, 2001, etc.) with the literary-reinvention genre as she imagines the Civil War from the viewpoint of Little Women’s Mr. March (a stand-in for Bronson Alcott).
In 1861, John March, a Union chaplain, writes to his family from Virginia, where he finds himself at an estate he remembers from his much earlier life. He’d come there as a young peddler and become a guest of the master, Mr. Clement, whom he initially admired for his culture and love of books. Then Clement discovered that March, with help from the light-skinned, lovely, and surprisingly educated house slave Grace, was teaching a slave child to read. The seeds of abolitionism were planted as March watched his would-be mentor beat Grace with cold mercilessness. When March’s unit makes camp in the now ruined estate, he finds Grace still there, nursing Clement, who is revealed to be, gasp, her father. Although drawn to Grace, March is true to his wife Marmee, and the story flashes back to their life together in Concord. Friends of Emerson and Thoreau, the pair became active in the Underground Railroad and raised their four daughters in wealth until March lost all his money in a scheme of John Brown’s. Now in the war-torn South, March finds himself embroiled in another scheme doomed to financial failure when his superiors order him to minister to the “contraband”: freed slaves working as employees for a northerner who has leased a liberated cotton plantation. The morally gray complications of this endeavor are the novel’s greatest strength. After many setbacks, the crop comes in, but the new plantation-owner is killed by marauders and his “employees” taken back into slavery. March, deathly ill, ends up in a Washington, DC, hospital, where Marmee visits and meets Grace, now a nurse. Readers of Little Women know the ending.
The battle scenes are riveting, the human drama flat.Pub Date: March 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03335-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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