LeFanu’s new anthology (Obsession, 1995—co-edited by Stephen Hayward) features 16 tales energized by the upbeat power of the ’60s preoccupation with death, dancing, and sex. Most of these stories accept the 1960s as a kind of paradigm of hedonism, examining what has happened to our perceptions of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll in the years since. Laurie Colwin’s sunny, steeply uplifting “The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing” (from her 1981 collection, The Lone Pilgrim) nicely captures the ’60s first innocence and begins: “Once upon a time, I was Professor Thorne Speizer’s stoned wife, and what a time that was.” Colwin’s hash-laced reefer prose powerfully evokes a nostalgia for a time now thoroughly vanished, and is alone worth the price of the book. The other pieces offer a considerably more sardonic take on sex and salvation, tracing the ways in which reality has overtaken those by now long-ago expectations of transcendence, and illuminating what such things as sex, drugs, and fantasy mean to us now. John Saul’s conjugally delicious “Honeymoon” tells of a European couple in sex-addled Copenhagen who seem to be writing a handbook on 21st-century lovemaking based on their own research between the hotel sheets. The hallucinating young heroine of Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Woman Is Born To Bleed” has taken two tabs of LSD and feels like an eel being boiled, which is hardly the right time to face the huge fright of her first period. In “The Story of No,” Texan writer Lisa Tuttle probes the damage worked by forbidden lust/forbidden dreams, updating the famous porno classic The Story of O in nicely postmodern fashion. As Philip Larkin noted, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963. If, with the rock band Dr. Hook, you can sing of the ’60s that “I was stone and I missed it,” here’s a perfectly legal, nonparanoid way to recapture days that have disappeared over the hills like wild horses.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-85242-538-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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