THE LONG TAKE

Name: THE LONG TAKE
Author: Robin Robertson
ISBN: 978-0-525-65521-3

by Robin Robertson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 20, 2018

Robertson’s novel in verse joins a tradition that includes Louis Zukofsky, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ed Sanders, and it doesn’t...

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Scottish poet Robertson serves up an epic poem of homelessness, dislocation, and inequality—set not today, though it could have been, but instead in the years after World War II.

Walker: It’s a good name for the protagonist, who “walks. That is his name and nature.” A Canadian washed up on the shores of Manhattan, he walks among ghosts, among anonymous people who wanted simply to be anonymous, “not swallowed whole, not to disappear,“ though that is what the city does to people. Walker is trying to shake off his wartime experiences, having landed at Normandy on D-Day and fought his way far inland; he spends his days in taprooms, his nights waiting watchfully for nightmares. A year passes, then another, and he makes his way west to Los Angeles, his fortunes not having improved much; as a fellow traveler says to him, meaningfully, “Just look at us now: two heroes in a hostel on Skid Row.” Walker finally pulls out of it in a Los Angeles whose pulse is that of movies such as The Naked City and The Big Clock; Robertson’s skillful weaving of cinematic history into a storyline that embraces hard-boiled journalism, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, and a kind of reflexive if sometimes-ironic nationalism that has never disappeared (“this here is the City of the Angels, Tinseltown, sit-yoo-ated / in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”) makes for juxtapositions that are sometimes unexpected but just right. Walker finally lands a job as a reporter, but, as Robertson makes clear, that only serves to accelerate his search among the hard-bitten, the hard-drinking, and the homeless for some missing part of himself, all the while against the hallucinatory backdrop of movies like Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper and tableaux like a rotting, beached humpback whale, “one pectoral fin stretched up like a sail."

Robertson’s novel in verse joins a tradition that includes Louis Zukofsky, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ed Sanders, and it doesn’t suffer by comparison.

Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-525-65521-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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NEVER FLINCH
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YOU LIKE IT DARKER
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Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.