Silly, aimless, and pretentious: Rapture reads like notes for a novel that the author had the good sense to abandon.
A loose and discursive novella by Minot (Evening, 1998, etc.), who manages here to ramble on a pretty good ways in remarkably few pages.
There is a particular post-coital moment when one everything begins to seem remarkable and striking—the pattern of the wallpaper, the ticking of the clock, the hissing of a radiator in the next room. The lovers in this tale are apparently trapped in such a moment, for they offer us, from beginning to end, nothing other than the sort of gooey platitudes (“He thought of his grandmother’s driveway. That’s what popped into his head. The way it looked in the fall with orange leaves on the bright green grass”) that are best washed away with a brisk, cold shower. The story itself—which appears only in a sort of fragmentary haze—is mostly a succession of flashbacks that describe the various steps by which Benjamin Young ended up in bed with Kay Bailey. Ben is a filmmaker who meets Kay during a movie shoot in Mexico. He is unhappily attached to Vanessa Crane, a college sweetheart who runs an art gallery and wants to marry him. Kay keeps some distance from Ben, although she is fascinated by certain parts of his body (“It was a curious organ, taking one form in repose, then becoming quite transformed when activated”), and she doesn’t seem ready to commit herself to anything. Ben, on the other hand, knows that he is not in love with Vanessa (“He still loved her, he’d always love her, but he wasn’t in love anymore”) and suspects that his true happiness will have something to do with Kay. If this all sounds rather vague, try to imagine it being narrated in the third-person: “I mean, here was Kay now, performing fellatio on him when she’d told him a year ago she never wanted to see him again. He didn’t get it.” Neither do we.
Silly, aimless, and pretentious: Rapture reads like notes for a novel that the author had the good sense to abandon.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41327-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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