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THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT

Name: THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT
Author: Steve Erickson
ISBN: 0-380-97766-4

by Steve Erickson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999

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38097766.499 Erickson, Steve THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT A sometimes disorienting novel from Erickson (American Nomad, 1997, etc.) weaves together the lives of a handful of people confronting the millennial apocalypse both personal and cosmic. Set mainly in Los Angeles and Paris over the course of four decades, from the “50s to the present, the story displays Erickson’s trademark obsession with underground, unnoticed lives and the ways they are conducted. He assembles a dozen or so chronicles of extremity, the central one belonging to Kristin, who at the last minute drops out of her role as the 2,000th participant in a strange cult’s New Year’s Eve 1999 mass suicide. Landing in Tokyo, she works as a “memory girl,” hired to listen as patrons tell the stories of their lives. (These need to be told because Japan’s collective memory has been evaporating since the Emperor abdicated his divinity in 1945.) Left with some empty time when a client expires one evening, Kristin begins to tell her own story, which involves poverty, trauma, and nearly a month of uninterrupted nudity in an empty house. The house belongs to “the Occupant,” who meets Kristin through a personal ad and introduces her to the Apocalypse Calendar, his own strange creation establishing a new schedule for the millennium based on the idea that the catastrophes that go unnoticed (e.g., assassinations in the developing world) are highly relevant, while the high-profile catastrophes that most of us hear about (say, the shooting of President Reagon) are trivial in the grand scheme of things. The calendar tells the story of the Occupant’s life, which folds into the lives of Mitch, Marie, and other equally alienated souls. In this haphazard collective biography, occasionally powerful epiphanies glimmer amid the cultural junk cluttering the social trash-heap through which these characters walk. Yet the distractingly complex plot sometimes doesn’t even make nonsense. And the taste for a naked young woman’s spiritual rejuvenation during sexual intercourse performed on her as she dangles blindfolded from a rope is, undoubtedly, an acquired pleasure.

Pub Date: April 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-380-97766-4

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SHADOWBAHN
by Steve Erickson

- BOOK REVIEW
THESE DREAMS OF YOU
by Steve Erickson

- BOOK REVIEW
ZEROVILLE
by Steve Erickson

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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.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.