From the raptures of Appalachian Spring to the many, complicated facets of women’s lives in that time and place: a superb...
Breathtaking both for its beauty and its pain, House’s second (after Clay’s Quilt, 2001) tells a finely nuanced tale of a Kentucky mountain family in the tumultuous WWI era, as the taking of a Cherokee bride unleashes passions that create life and destroy it.
Vine seems a vision to young Saul when he first sees her as he and his brother Aaron ride by her house on horseback, but she quickly proves real, giving emergency treatment when Aaron is bitten by a copperhead. The feelings between Saul and Vine being mutual, their courtship is brief despite her mother’s misgivings, and she moves from all-Cherokee Redbud Camp to all-white God’s Creek, where Saul and Aaron live with their mother Esme. For a time all is well: the couple build their own house, Vine gives birth to daughter Birdie and becomes a beloved daughter to Esme. But work pressures increase for Saul, a logging foreman, as the clouds of war gather, and he must go away to distant mountains from which he can rarely get time off to travel home. In his absence, Aaron moves from brazenly staring at Vine to making an unwelcome advance. Rebuffed, he disappears, much to his doting mother’s dismay. When he returns a few months later with a pregnant bride of his own, however, Esme is not much relieved, as Aaron beats his wife, drinks, disappears for days at a time, and still lusts after Vine. His attempt to rape her in front of Birdie is the point of no return: Vine kills him in self-defense but keeps it a secret, watching in agony as Aaron’s “disappearance” eats away at Esme and at Aaron’s wife. Finally, she’ll see her secret come between her and Saul when the war ends and he returns home for good.
From the raptures of Appalachian Spring to the many, complicated facets of women’s lives in that time and place: a superb combination of wonder and suffering.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-367-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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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
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