Skillful, intelligent, always readable but this time less-persuasive work from an appealing author.
Charismatic young playwright Luke Kanowski, escaping a dark family history to forge his own destiny in London’s Theatreland, heads the cast in a welcome if less sure-footed return to period heartache by talented British writer Jones (The Uninvited Guests, 2012, etc.).
Notably deft in her reconstructions of not-so-distant eras, Jones here tags Biba fashion, the Osmonds, T. Rex and a myriad other evocative details of the late 1960s and early ’70s as background to the four stage-struck hopefuls at the center of her fourth novel, each of them significantly molded by their parents’ influences. Luke has broken away from a grim home life—his father’s a boozy immigrant, his mother’s a long-term patient in the local mental asylum—after a chance meeting with two strangers, aspiring stage producer Paul Driscoll and student Leigh Radley. Paul and Luke are destined to become firm friends, while Leigh, caught between them, will become Paul’s girlfriend after a humiliatingly hurtful early encounter with Luke. Actress Nina Jacobs has survived the lifelong pressure of a competitive mother by walling herself in passivity. While Luke begins to find success as a writer, Nina is pushed by her mother into a relationship with Tony Moore, a manipulative stage producer of ambiguous sexual orientation. Tony not only marries Nina, but casts her in a play about a torture victim, which makes her a star—and bewitches Luke into wanting to save her. Jones’ gift for emotional intensity has not deserted her, but her material here is less beguiling than in her two first (and strongest) novels, The Outcast (2008) and Small Wars (2010). Nina is an unsympathetic character, and the psychology underpinning events develops in increasingly schematic fashion. Crises, broken promises and bruised hearts ensue, and although the story comes to rest in the right place, it never quite escapes its sense of staginess.
Skillful, intelligent, always readable but this time less-persuasive work from an appealing author.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229281-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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