The faint but persistent acrid undertone of Miller's best-seller of last season, The Good Mother (its popular focus, a child-abuse custody case), dominates these 11 short stories in which an unhappy mix of divorced or partner-hopping lovers and parents—both young and middle-aged, all middle class—fumble at self-determination, with random grabs at status or security or, simply, drama in a drifting life. Miller's people—most of them vaguely bothered most of the time—when it comes to a grip on the Good Life, are all thumbs. In the title story, a young man becomes obsessed with the daughters of the richest man in his tiny midwestern town, since, fatherless early, and with a distracted mother, he needed a status-y "sense of place." Yet like the mother in "The Abbotts," who will watch her son lope foolishly after bogus American status, the young grandmother in "Leaving Home," living within the miserable marriage of her son, knows that she has "no power to stave off ruin. . .to guard her son against his share of pain." Meanwhile, women court depression; in "Slides," yesterday's nude photos, which stirred an ex-husband, only underscore time past with an aging lover; and in "Travel," a woman traveling in a small South American country, with a deal-making, exploitative lover, capitulates lo American privilege and self-loathing. And men strut in foolish sexual rituals: one is a telephone freak who, at the close, is repeatedly ringing a recorded message; and a "man who loved women" sleeps with two, feeling, since he was passionately involved, that he was "faithful to both." The story of a young mother who wanders from the boring bed of her eighth lover to assemble her son's toy train ("Expensive Gifts") contains the central image, as the disconnected cars (like disconnected families) have a way of magnetically repelling one another when clumsily manipulated. An adventurous, chilly collection of stories, some with a John Cheever-ish bite, about uncoupled lives rattling on into isolation.
Pub Date: May 1, 1987
ISBN: 0060157550
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1987
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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