With a labyrinthine, but coherent structure, this tale about an enigmatic widower turns out to be as sincere as it is dark.
A debut drama follows an elderly man re-examining his life and beliefs as he awaits the imminent End of Days in 2012.
Somerset Garden returns to his home in Drums, Pennsylvania, shortly after the death of his wife, Nona. The couple had been living in Baltimore for more than 25 years, having abandoned Drums after their son, Cole, vanished on his 18th birthday. Somerset’s planning to renovate the old house but he’s also looking forward to the prophesied Armageddon on Dec. 21, the same day he turns 80. A former believer, he now blames a “heartless and imperfect God” for Cole’s disappearance and for a world wrought with famine, tsunamis, and other such calamities. He dives headfirst into his memories, recalling his angry, withdrawn son, who may have tried burning down a church. Even further back is the protagonist’s sadistic, hateful father, Blake, who recites Scripture while tormenting or beating Somerset and his older brother, Wally, with the latter often reveling in the parent’s savagery. Somerset’s life is filled with regret, including an inability to save his mother, Pearl, from the brutality she invariably endured. This may, however, be insights into a man’s fractured mind. He enters into frequent mental discourses with Nona and Cole, and converses with a porcelain-faced boy who, Somerset confesses, may or may not actually be in his house. The bleak, stream-of-consciousness narrative will likely have some readers questioning the legitimacy of Somerset’s recollections. The protagonist, for one, is inconsistent: unsure of his birth year but later settling on 1933, and contrarily asserting that God’s dead, absent, or a complete fabrication. Notwithstanding, Somerset is coming to terms with his past, including a fear that he’s capable of the same cruelty as his father. He isn’t reminiscing in sorrow, but audaciously confronting his failures—later scenes are both more revealing and more violent— and welcoming his potential end with open arms. Kalsi’s nonlinear approach is intelligible, with random voices in Somerset’s head easy to decipher: he’s Dutch to Nona and Pops to Cole. The author’s prose, too, is melodic, even at its strangest, like equating “misshapen country lemons” to baby squid.
With a labyrinthine, but coherent structure, this tale about an enigmatic widower turns out to be as sincere as it is dark.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9907790-6-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Little Feather Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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