Thirteen stories, mainly Kafkaesque fables grounded in political outrage, take on an eerie logic of their own when they succeed, as most of them do. Those that don't hover between docudrama and absurdism. Many of Nichols's tales begin in everydayness and veer quickly into strangeness or toss off a first line that posits a strange world and then realistically fills in the dots. ``The Secret Radio Station'' is a fabulist sketch about a station where a ``continuous flow of the unknown language'' is ``interspersed with Jesus rock,'' creating a world—appropriately metafictional—where nothing is as it seems. ``The Barn Raising'' follows a great first line (``We were on our way to register the plan for utopia at the town offices'') with a prosaic but intriguing chronicle of disillusionment. In ``The Changing Beast,'' a story that lampoons paranoia, the Total Planet Food Coop is vandalized, and its members spend a good deal of ink trying to figure out who the culprit is- -The Beast, a half-bear/half-ram capable of human form; disgruntled former member Chuck; or Mr. Belfast, associated with the A&P, a competitor. In ``Meeting Trains,'' a suburban midwestern crossroads where Indian weavers and Haitian cane-cutters arrive becomes a paradigm of pluralism (``Each neighborhood is called by a different name in a different language''). ``Protecting Mendez'' is a fictionalization of the slaying of Chico Mendez, while ``Six Ways of Looking at Farming'' juxtaposes two cultures in order to talk about ``how farms could be lost through debt'' and—a constant theme throughout here—about ``the pleasure of the strangeness being broken by words.'' Imagine Sherwood Anderson on drugs and into political causes. Add a good dose of playfulness and late-20th-century absurdity, and you get Nichols (author of the four-volume utopian novel Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai).
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8018-4195-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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