Victimhood in all its glory.
A 30-year-old woman, near death, comes to grips with her mother’s abandonment of the family 15 years earlier.
When Piper Kinkaid was 14, her mother disappeared from the family’s working-class home in rural Vermont, perhaps with another man, certainly to escape her husband’s stifling neediness. Now Piper, in the last stages of breast cancer, begins to receive letters from her mother—wordless letters that contain nothing but shards of the glass her mother used in her art. With this, Greenwood (Nearer Than the Sky, 2000, etc.) begins to use glass imagery in a self-consciously literary attempt to unify her narrative as it moves between Piper’s struggle with approaching death, on the one hand, and the memories she has of her mother’s abandonment, on the other. Throughout, Piper’s first-person narrative portrays her as a pathetic victim of forces beyond her control, although readers may begin to feel curmudgeonly as the litany of misfortune—and her nobility—grows. After her mother left, Piper and her older brother Quinn had to fend for themselves, especially when their weak and ineffectual father latched onto a new woman. Score another abandonment for Piper, who quickly drifted into an affair with a widowed teacher with his own dark past. After being attacked by some high-school boys, Piper let Quinn believe the teacher was responsible. Now, as her cancer worsens and her best friend cares for her with remarkable selflessness, Piper toys with the possibility of contacting the teacher to apologize. In truth, his culpability is obvious: he took advantage of a needy young girl, in part because she reminded him of the daughter he gave up (as in abandoned) after his wife’s accidental death. Quinn, who has shown nothing but loving care for Piper, comes to visit. She tells him of her mother’s attempts at contact and considers whether to go see her. In the end, by now fading fast, Piper decides against it: this woman would not be the same she adored as a child.
Victimhood in all its glory.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28473-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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