A factory owner’s suicide hastens the decline of a small town.
Woodring (Springtime on Mars, 2008, etc.) doesn’t specify the state, but her fictional Goliath is clearly in the South, and the fact that the on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy factory makes furniture suggests her native North Carolina. It’s a mild October day when teenaged Vincent Bailey finds the crushed body of Percy Harding on the railroad tracks, but cold weather and hard times are coming. Percy’s death has changed Goliath’s zeitgeist, thinks police chief Clyde Winston: “It was as if every person in town had put their own bodies in way of the train and were all broken now, spiritless.” Mood-directing statements like this dot the narrative, which swoops in and out of many lives. Central among them is Rosamond Rogers, who was Percy’s secretary and has become a reluctant repository of her neighbors’ confidences about everything from stealing candy to deliberately pricking babies with diaper pins. None of the confidences seem to justify the book’s lugubrious atmosphere, nor does the main action, which shows Rosamond and her daughter Agnes groping for love with Clyde and his son Ray, county groundskeeper and freelance preacher. (Rosamond’s traveling-salesman husband left years ago; Agnes has dropped out of college and a sort-of marriage to return to Goliath, though she’s not quite sure why.) A more baroque plotline follows Vincent, radically unsettled by his discovery of Percy’s corpse, in his reckless friendship with the equally troubled Cassie, who incites the boy to eat increasingly dangerous objects (culminating in a live mouse) and to rob houses with her. These stories, and many other subordinate ones, develop very slowly, and Woodring’s tone adds to the sense of stasis—she mistakes portentousness for seriousness and proclamations for insights. The climax, complete with a parade, a baseball game and a cataclysmic fire, is much too obviously designed to ensure “that Goliath should end in devastation and miracle.”
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-67501-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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
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
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