The big news about Bellow's new novella (just a bit over 100 pages long) is that it is being published from the start as a paperback—a rare move for a blue-chip writer. The book itself is less momentous: one episode (ostensibly pivotal) in the life of "the czarina of fashion writing," steadily intriguing and crisply told yet oddly lacking in resonance and conviction. Clara Velde, "a rawboned American woman," part Indiana and part uptown Manhattan, has begun middle age in good shape: triumphant career, three darling daughters, and a tolerable fourth marriage (to handsome, ineffectual Wilder). But Clara has never quite accepted the dead-end status of her long relationship with Ithiel "Teddy" Regler—a foreign-affairs expert to presidents (never quite at the Kissinger level) who married other women, wasn't even monogamous in his philandering, and once drove Clara to the brink of suicide. So, when Clara can't find the longtime symbol of Teddy's passion (a valuable emerald ring he gave her), she is deeply upset. Especially since she's convinced that the ring has been stolen by the shady boyfriend of the Velde children's beloved nanny: comely young Gina from Austria. And Clara finds herself facing a series of ethical dilemmas as she tries simultaneously to recover the ring, judge Gina's behavior, reassess the importance of her passion for Teddy. . .and take stock of her own strengths and weaknesses. Bellow works hard to invest this anecdotal material with Jamesian layers of morality and psychology; there's even an explicit attempt to make the doomed Clara/Teddy affair a metaphor for world politics. ("We have the power to destroy ourselves, and maybe even the desire, and we keep ourselves in permanent suspense—waiting.") But Clara, whose dialogue often slides into stagy rhetoric, remains more an assemblage of striking attitudes than a fully drawn, believable character. (The sketching-in of her role as "attentive mother"—which becomes crucial at the finale—is particularly flimsy.) And Bellow's readers will have to be satisfied with the very substantial page-by-page pleasures of his narration: the dry wit, the edgy intelligence, the severely elegant prose, and the easy mastery of viewpoint, time-frame, and voicing.
Pub Date: March 28, 1989
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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