The first of this Irish author's acclaimed novels to be published here is a surprisingly tender, complex take on life and love in Belfast at the mean-street level, where horrors mysteriously transmogrify into things of hope and beauty. Catholic narrator Jake Jackson is a paragon of conflicted allegiances: His best friend is a Protestant; he himself is an ex- tough guy who wants only to live peaceably in his house on Poetry Street with his cat; and six months after his last love left him, he longs to be in a relationship but insults every woman drawn to his handsome face. Meanwhile, his fat, balding, working-class friend Chuckie has problems of his own over on Eureka Street, though to Jake those are to die for: Chuckie has somehow become the love object of a beautiful American, who mauls him to new heights of sexual bliss; and for reasons equally obscure, financiers are suddenly throwing big money at his pie-in-the-sky ecumenical schemes. He brings Jake along for the venture-capital ride, but there are periodic reality checks. Chuckie has to go to the America in pursuit of his departed, pregnant lover, leaving Jake behind to go a few verbal rounds with her pretty, arch-nationalist roommate, who excoriates him for his mild-mannered take on the Troubles. The bloody streets of Belfast offer impediments to lighthearted fancy as well: Chuckie's mother goes into deep shock at being an eyewitness to a massive IRA lunch-counter bombing in which 17 are killed, and a street urchin Jake befriended is beaten nearly to death for peeing on an IRA chief's car. In the new hope offered by a cease-fire, though, love has time to conquer all. The plot twists are over the top at times, but the characters are genuine, often funny, and Wilson's evident love for the long- suffering city itself is an inspired thread that binds the story gloriously together.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-396-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
This second novel in a planned trilogy lacks the breadth and richness of Erdrich at her best, but middling Erdrich is still...
Erdrich returns to the North Dakota Ojibwe community she introduced in The Plague of Doves (2008)—akin but at a remove from the community she created in the continuum of books from Love Medicine to The Red Convertible—in this story about the aftermath of a rape.
Over a decade has passed. Geraldine and Judge Bazil Coutts, who figured prominently in the earlier book, are spending a peaceful Sunday afternoon at home. While Bazil naps, Geraldine, who manages tribal enrollment, gets a phone call. A little later she tells her 13-year-old son, Joe, she needs to pick up a file in her office and drives away. When she returns hours later, the family’s idyllic life and Joe’s childhood innocence are shattered. She has been attacked and raped before escaping from a man who clearly intended to kill her. She is deeply traumatized and unwilling to identify the assailant, but Bazil and Joe go through Bazil’s case files, looking for suspects, men with a grudge against Bazil, who adjudicates cases under Native American jurisdiction, most of them trivial. Joe watches his parents in crisis and resolves to avenge the crime against his mother. But it is summer, so he also hangs out with his friends, especially charismatic, emotionally precocious Cappy. The novel, told through the eyes of a grown Joe looking back at himself as a boy, combines a coming-of-age story (think Stand By Me) with a crime and vengeance story while exploring Erdrich’s trademark themes: the struggle of Native Americans to maintain their identity; the legacy of the troubled, unequal relationship between Native Americans and European Americans, a relationship full of hatred but also mutual dependence; the role of the Catholic Church within a Native American community that has not entirely given up its own beliefs or spirituality. Favorite Erdrich characters like Nanapush and Father Damien make cameo appearances.
This second novel in a planned trilogy lacks the breadth and richness of Erdrich at her best, but middling Erdrich is still pretty great.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-206524-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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
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