To follow the theme, there's a depth of feeling here but the writing is adrift.
A cautionary tale of suburban life by debut author Marren.
As the novel opens, artist Lainie Smith Morris is telling her four children the tale of the selkie, a mythic woman, half-human and half-seal, who's locked into human form when her seal skin is stolen by a fisherman who wants her to marry him; her human children are her only consolation. Themes from the fable are prominently placed: Lainie wants water “like a vampire wants blood” and, ad infinitum, cites proximity to bodies of water as necessary for her survival. Her surgeon husband won her by buying the masterpiece of her burgeoning art career, and when he moves them from Manhattan's Riverside Drive to Elliot, New Jersey—a fictional, landlocked Stepford suburb—she hardly resists. Her 12-year-old daughter believes Lainie is a selkie and frets she’ll swim away forever—a forced-seeming concern for a girl who otherwise appears quite adult. Lainie reassures her that she won’t leave but rarely that she isn’t a selkie, leaving the matter, along with much of the novel, opaque. Half the passages are narrated by Jess, Lainie’s frenemy from way back, now queen of the Elliot scene, who involves herself in Lainie’s life, giving and taking away equally. The novel is moody and despairing, the writing poetic and abstract, the women cleareyed yet complacent about their constricted lives and horrible husbands. They make declarations about present circumstances that are not supported by past revelations; both claim to love their families, but there’s very little evidence. Marren has an irksome habit of writing exposition as stilted dialogue. With characters as unreliable as these, everything is left in question.
To follow the theme, there's a depth of feeling here but the writing is adrift.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06673-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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