Naval gazing of the most self-indulgent sort.
Finnamore, whose Otherwise Engaged (1999) detailed a wedding engagement from proposal to ceremony, uses the same formula with pregnancy. The effect is like a long evening spent watching slides of someone else’s trip to Niagara Falls.
The Zygote Chronicles reads less like a novel in journal form than like a journal that’s been novelized, particularly since the authorial acknowledgments make it clear that no names have been changed to protect the innocent—or guilty. The narrator, last name Finnamore, begins with inception, which occurs after a romantic dinner, although the teller glosses over the sexy part. Then begins the countdown. At six weeks, things are still romantic with the father-to-be—presumably a case of love at first sight—who assures the narrator that every month she’s pregnant she’ll grow only more beautiful. By eight weeks, nausea has set in. With a jokiness that would seem tired on most TV sitcoms, Finnamore tells us which foods she can no longer stomach and how sensitized her olfactory senses have grown. She slides in some liberal guilt about the rosy future her child is likely to have in contrast to the lives of the have-nots in her old neighborhood, and she offers the unborn child moral pieties about sexism and homophobia. In the least cloying sections, she ponders her own less-than-ideal family and her husband’s more romantic roots. Mostly, she offers up an assortment of petty complaints and small moments of joy (hearing the heartbeat, feeling the movement, seeing the sonogram) that come across as generic and far less interesting than most women will remember from their own experience. Still, one does have to admire the narrator’s honesty about her weight when she tips the scales above 180. The only true moment of excitement occurs when the narrator has an emergency C-section. Mother and baby do fine and return home, no doubt ready to start a follow-up on baby’s first year.
Naval gazing of the most self-indulgent sort.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1706-6
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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