paper 1-889330-29-9 Another in the imitation-of-the-greats genre, this time turning on the narrow premise that Mr. Clarissa Dalloway was gay. (Lippincott wrote The Real, True Angel, stories, not reviewed.) For a decade, Richard Dalloway, aged 55 and retired from Parliament, has been carrying on an affair with one Robert Davies, ten years his junior and as enamored of Richard as Richard is of him. Clarissa herself, when Richard confessed to her the nature of what was going on, informed him with classic tolerance that she “understood——and that seemed to have been that. And yet Richard’s secret torture still won—t go away as he suffers ploddingly between the torment of desire and the awful terror of discovery. Like Mrs. Dalloway in her book, Mr. Dalloway walks through the park, buys flowers, thinks about the past, plans a party—for the Dalloways” 30th anniversary. His and others” thoughts are portrayed amid small blizzards of parentheses (and shouldn—t they be?) far in excess (one can—t help but feel) of any Woolfian measure, while a craven imitativeness in style, however skilled, seems designed as much to fill stage-time as to advance or reveal (Woolf’s towering purpose) things (—Oh, it is cruel, Richard Dalloway thought—life, time: cruel—). Waiting (and waiting) for the party to begin, explorations are made into the causes of the same-sex love in Robbie and Richard—Robbie’s wonderful relation with his now-absent father, Richard’s hideous relation with his—not to mention Richard’s unbounded love for his younger brother Duncan, who in his early teens, however, bowed tragically out of life altogether (—There. There it was. There he was—a white, bloodless Duncan, hanging...from one of the rafters. No! Richard turned away. It couldn—t be! No! It wasn—t possible . . . .—). A first novel that’s often elegant (to a fault, one quickly adds) in imitation of surface and style but that gravely misconstrues its high model by bending it to lesser and unoriginal aims.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-889330-28-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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