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INTERSTATE

Name: INTERSTATE
Author: Stephen Dixon
ISBN: 0-8050-2654-1

by Stephen Dixon ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1995

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A mildly experimental narrative of a driver whose daughter is shot and killed on the interstate in an act of random violence. Eight interconnected narratives dramatize the lasting effects of such violence on the survivors. Dixon's paragraphs are pages long, and his tone is best described as modulated affectlessness. The reader is swept along, not with as much exuberance as in Stephen Wright's similar Going Native, but by a hypnotic intensity that replicates zoned-out road weariness and the numbness that sets in after tragedy. In the first section, the protagonist watches as one daughter, Julie, is killed while the other, Margo, survives. Obsessed, he hunts the murderers day and night, finally runs over two people who may or may not be the ones who gunned down Julie, spends years in prison, is released, does his best to befriend his surviving daughter, is shot and partially paralyzed in a holdup, and finally dies in his sleep. Subsequent narratives take small pieces of this story and expand them elaborately in the manner of Nicholson Baker. The second narrative is centered in the hospital, the third in the car. In the fourth, the man tells his daughters how to protect themselves from harm in the city; it stops before the terror begins. The fifth shows the father thinking back years later on what might have happened. The sixth, told in the second person (``How do you sit and answer questions from the police?''), stops at the point when he prepares to view the body. The last two narratives subvert the first six: In the seventh, there is no murder, but an accident in which Margo may also have been killed; in the eighth, nobody is hurt. Throughout, Dixon has avoided his usual glibness, which can be overbearing to the point of self- parody, in favor of more serious reflection. Dixon's 17th book (The Stories of Stephen Dixon, 1994, etc.) is a powerful meditation on contemporary violence and the ways we daydream about it. (Author tour)

Pub Date: May 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-8050-2654-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LATE STORIES
by Stephen Dixon

- BOOK REVIEW
MEYER
by Stephen Dixon

- BOOK REVIEW
30
by Stephen Dixon

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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.