You won’t look at those young, white-shirted Mormon men on their bicycles in quite the same way again.
In which Mormon missionaries take positions, some contrary, dark and violent.
Elder McLeod is a brooding young man with the natural tendencies of a juvenile delinquent; about the first thing we learn about him is that he is inclined to make “a half show of resistance” about all things, not least the work he’s doing. So why is he sweating his way through “the close, crucible heat” of Brazil? Therein hangs part of ex-Mormon writer McIlvain’s smart if anticlimactic yarn of a not-so-quiet American who, on his required mission as a newly minted Mormon “elder,” butts up against a real elder, an older Brazilian named Elder Passos who has very different ideas of how the world works and who’s in charge than McLeod. Passos is earnest and dogged, not inclined to give up. And he loves a good challenge, including the one set before him and his missionary partner by a lively and willing young woman and her much less pliable husband, who, when confronted with the prospect of converting, counters that if she wants to be religious, she should go to Mass more often. There’s more to it than all that, of course, and Josefina—she of the cutoff jeans “and the legs in them”—poses a crisis of conscience for McLeod that will lead to some spirit-shattering moments as he and Passos wrestle like Jacob and the angel. McIlvain, a recent Stegner Fellow, does a fine job of setting up the multifaceted conflict that guides his swiftly paced novel, and if the resolution seems both incomplete and hurried, the writing is assured and often quite funny, as when McLeod, grappling for the Portuguese necessary to acquire the services of a hooker, comes up with a biblical equivalent that has his provider proclaim, happily, “I’m your harlot.”
You won’t look at those young, white-shirted Mormon men on their bicycles in quite the same way again.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95569-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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