Inventive, funny, grotesque, and ribald—a book with something for everyone as long as no one demands that it makes sense.
A collection of dated diary-style entries that come together to form nothing quite as conclusive as a novel, Steele’s debut chronicles a coming-of-age story for the surrealist in us all.
A young man from the La Grange suburbs of Chicago is embarking on a trip to LA, where he will live with his sister, Kim. Only his legs have stopped working in psychosomatic protest. Only there is a talking mold-mouth in the corner of his bedroom ceiling that has colonized his brain and established a “private line to [his] unconscious” via spores. Only the season inside the house no longer matches the season outside the house, and his father may not be real. Things don’t get any easier out west. Kim comes home with a pet which appears to be a “genetic hybrid dream portal canine-baby escapee” and clogs the kitchen drain with its teeth. The little black pills that make your “brain feel carbonated” also call into existence a norm-core hallucination named Larry who lurks about tepidly. Laurie, the narrator’s girlfriend, dumps him by moving to their landlord’s building in France, one of the many buildings he maintains around the world by “hand-pick[ing his] tenants to create perfect counterparts of the same building in each country.” Also, there is a decorative skull paperweight that has eaten the narrator’s soul. Also, his legs—replacement parts bestowed upon him by the mold-mouth back in La Grange—have started to visibly rot. Each segment of this bizarro novel is crafted as a speed-of-light vignette—a brief pulse that illuminates the sordid, the unsavory, the cruel, and the hilarious burden of the everyday. This project was originally conceived of as a blog, launched in 2013, and the results here still read like compiled entries in a medium that requires neither context nor the development of character, theme, motif, or any of the other typical hallmarks of a novel. The result is a sublimely contemporary study of a universal truth: Growing up is weird to do.
Inventive, funny, grotesque, and ribald—a book with something for everyone as long as no one demands that it makes sense.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944700-60-7
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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