``There isn't much sap in this family anymore. There isn't much juice.'' This striking dissection and display of a family echoes the author's memoir, Passion and Prejudice (1989), in which she exposed what she saw as the smothering mores of the Bingham family empire. Here is Bingham's fictional intuition of the minor miseries and pleasures within the great safe house of enveloping civility—in 1958 North Carolina, Kentucky, and Cambridge, Mass. Spare, plain, single, 45-year-old Louise Macelvens is pleased with small victories few would understand, like persuading sister Shelby—huge, damp, severely mentally impaired—to eat breakfast. Tending Shelby gives Louise substance (``after all...we are born to manage, not to love''). Soon, however, generous cousin ``Big Tom,'' a Kentucky state senator, will ship Shelby, fresh from a frothing fit, to a mental hospital—for Louise's sake. Louise aims to get her home. In Cambridge, meanwhile, college student Tom, 19, only surviving son of Big Tom and wife Mugsie (his charming, ``odd'' brother Paul has been dead a year) flounders in his loneliness, his guilts, and sexual infantilism. He loses a girl and speeds home, distraught, to his old nurse (and maybe his blue baby blanket?). The parents glide around Tom, seemingly impervious, yet worrying- -without touching: Big Tom, a whiz at ``controlling the distances that separate him from the other people''; and cool, pretty Mugsie, descending the stairs ``like a hawk on an air current.'' In letters to Tom (she hopes he'll help her get Shelby), Louise treats him to some family history—dry old men, pretty women in lives of duty and drab, and two suicides. Louise does spring Shelby (in a bitterly comic maneuver), and her advice to young Tom, characteristically stalled (Louise's estimate of him as ``a fool'' seems on target), is as cruel as truth as she sends him north ``to beat your brains out against a stone wall.'' A shriving family portrait gallery, both compassionate and ruthless.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-944072-20-8
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
IN THE NEWS
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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