An uncharacteristic misstep in a brilliant writer’s estimable career.
Terrorist Henry Smart, the memorable IRA antihero of Doyle’s superb sixth novel (A Star Called Henry, 1999) makes an imperfect conquest of America in this widely ranging sequel.
We pick up Henry’s story in 1924, after his arrival in New York City (just ahead of gunmen assigned to kill him) and entry into the criminal underclass as an “advertising” impresario employing sandwich-board bearers. Still pining for the wife left behind, whom he knew only as “Miss O’Shea” (she having been his teacher), Henry—a strapping 23-year-old few women can resist—finds substitutes, and reasons to head west after he has infringed on mobster Louis Lepke’s turf and pleasured himself with the mistress of Hibernian-immigrant bootlegger Owney Madden. In Chicago, Henry discovers the “furious, happy and lethal” newly popular music called jazz, and bonds—rather unbelievably—with the young Louis Armstrong, who makes Henry (amusingly addressed as “O’Pops”) his de facto “white manager.” If you think this is beginning to sound like Forrest Gump, read on. Briefly and improbably reunited with Miss O’Shea and the daughter (Saoirse) he’s never seen, Henry follows the embattled (and unemployable) Armstrong to Harlem, meets gangster-nightclub owner Dutch Schultz, and reconnects with a resourceful whore who has reinvented herself as “Sister Flo” (an evangelist of the Aimee Semple McPherson variety), soon thereafter leaving Louis’s employ and moving on to LA. Surviving an encounter with a Dublin hit man, Henry rides the rails during the Depression years, loses a leg along with his family (one more time, as jazzmen say), and ends up in California in 1946, schmoozing with filmmaker John Ford, who vows his next movie will tell “the real Irish story”: i.e., Henry’s. A surprising amount of this nonsense is quite absorbing, because Booker-winner Doyle is too lively and skilled a novelist to let it be otherwise. But Oh, Play That Thing is fatally overstuffed and chaotic.
An uncharacteristic misstep in a brilliant writer’s estimable career.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03361-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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