A chilly, desolate work, as painful to read as diving into a frigid lake.
A Georgia O’Keeffe biographer, storywriter, and third-novelist (This is My Daughter, 1998, etc.) pursues in lusterless fashion a conflicted widow who marries the wrong brother.
Water is the dominant metaphor in this emotionally bloodless work: late-40s protagonist Isabel Green is an expert in effluent contamination at NYC’s Environmental Protection Resources, and her brand-new self-important second husband, Paul Simmons, has brought her for the first time to visit his family’s lakefront summer home, Sweetwater, in the Adirondacks. Isabel is still recovering from the depression-induced suicide of her first husband and has married Paul out of sympathetic pity and hope for comfort in old age—a decision soon revealed as cruel and shortsighted. Paul and his aged, unloving parents are severely stiffened WASPs with crosses to bear: Paul’s own lifetime grudge concerns a jealous rivalry with his younger brother, Whitney, a never-married Wyoming conservation-biologist whom Paul suspects of stealing his girlfriends. In fact, Whit does attract Isabel, with his stories of observing and protecting western lions, and her staggering betrayal coincides with the approach of a forest fire as the Simmons family tongue-barb each other mercilessly about their shortcomings. The story is a strange amalgamation: a treatise on environmental stewardship; an elegiac memoir about the desertion experienced after the suicide of a spouse; and an awkward growing-to-maturity feminine manifesto. Although Isabel is reading Proust (mentioned offhandedly), her utter lack of self-knowledge is preposterous after Robinson’s meticulous chronicling of her early courtship with and marriage to Michael; motherhood and later attempts to conceive a second child; career development and fear and denial of Michael’s growing depression—as preposterous as Isabel’s marriage to a man merely to be nice. Robinson takes no risks as a writer (“Isabel’s imagination was water, and the more she learned about it, the more marvelous it seemed”), and as a result her writing seems as constipated as her characters.
A chilly, desolate work, as painful to read as diving into a frigid lake.Pub Date: May 20, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50916-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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