Margaret Mitchell it’s not, but Cooper’s sometimes tender tale of love and confusion is a pleasure to read.
A lively redneck romance with out-of-the-headlines currency.
Purvis Driggers isn’t what you’d call the most solid of citizens in the swampy South Carolina lowlands. Not yet 30, he thinks like a codger. He also swears with the avidity of a heretic and the fluency of a poet, and Cooper (Humanities/College of Central Florida) adds much entertainment value to an already entertaining tale with the blasphemies of Purvis and his trailer-park coterie: “Jesus’ striped ass!” “Baby Jesus in a biscuit.” “Oh, Jesus on a root.” An accidental encounter with Aristotle has smartened Purvis up a touch (“I’m mostly a blunt tool,” he remarks, “but sometimes I can be sharpened up. Ockham the Razor.”), but he’s still a chump. As Cooper’s picaresque tale opens, Purvis is smack in the middle of a breaking-and-entering job that goes wrong from the start, and that convinces him that there’s a G-man in his future. Purvis is not just paranoid but also lovelorn, for out in the tangled woods he’s seen his siren, a sturdy, desperate woman by the sonorous name of Martha Umphlett, and his heart has beaten differently ever since. Martha, for her part, would rather be anywhere but there; only a fantastically obese mother with failing health keeps her down on the farm. A triangle forms in the person of a hirsute monk who actually does think complete philosophical thoughts—and the situation even threatens to square up by the presence of a ghostly “green man” out in the woods. Things don’t quite work out as anyone expects, and besides, as will happen in small communities, there are unexpected genealogical mysteries to work out as well. But for all that, as well as for an explanation of the “purple Jesus” of the title, you’ll want to read Cooper’s rollicking tale, which has elements of the hero quest, echoes of ancient mythology and some resolutely modern moments of extreme violence.
Margaret Mitchell it’s not, but Cooper’s sometimes tender tale of love and confusion is a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-890862-70-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.
Alcoholism brutally controls the destiny of a beautiful woman and her children in working-class Scotland.
The way Irvine Welsh’s Trainspottingcarved a permanent place in our heads and hearts for the junkies of late-1980s Edinburgh, the language, imagery, and story of fashion designer Stuart’s debut novel apotheosizes the life of the Bain family of Glasgow. Stunning, raven-haired Agnes Bain is often compared to Elizabeth Taylor. When we meet her in 1981, she’s living with her parents and three “weans” in a crowded high-rise flat in a down-and-out neighborhood called Sighthill. Her second husband, Hugh "Shug" Bain, father of her youngest, Shuggie, is a handsome taxi driver with a philandering problem that is racing alongside Agnes’ drinking problem to destroy their never-very-solid union. In indelible, patiently crafted vignettes covering the next 11 years of their lives, we watch what happens to Shuggie and his family. Stuart evokes the experience of each character with unbelievable compassion—Agnes; her mother, Lizzie; Shug; their daughter, Catherine, who flees the country the moment she can; artistically gifted older son Leek; and the baby of the family, Shuggie, bullied and outcast from toddlerhood for his effeminate walk and manner. Shuggie’s adoration of his mother is the light of his life, his compass, his faith, embodied in his ability to forgive her every time she resurrects herself from a binge: “She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.” How can love be so powerful and so helpless at the same time? Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down—then read the first sentence of the acknowledgements and lose it. The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open.
You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4804-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her...
Love and ambition clash in a novel depicting China's turbulent 1980s.
Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father. Liya grew up with a single mother, the brilliant but troubled physicist Su Lan, who refused to talk about Liya's missing father. Mother and daughter grew increasingly estranged as Su Lan obsessed over her theoretical research. Complicating Liya's search for truth is the fact she was born in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the very night of the government crackdown on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. Su Lan changed Liya's birth year on her papers to obscure this fact in America. The reader is meant to wonder if Liya's father perhaps died during the crackdown. However, this is not a novel about the idealism of the student reform movement or even the decisions behind the government's use of lethal force. Instead Jin focuses on the personalities of three students: the young Su Lan as well as Zhang Bo and Li Yongzong, two of her high school classmates who were rivals for her affection. The novel shifts point of view and jumps back and forth in time, obscuring vital pieces of information from the reader in order to prolong the mystery. Not all the plot contrivances make sense, but Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time. The title refers to the thoughts of a nurse, musing about the similarities that she sees between the Tiananmen student demonstrators and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution: "A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks."
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her ambition.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293595-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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