Historian and novelist Ali (Redemption, 1991, etc.) charts the lives of a family of activists from the days of the Russian Revolution to the post-Wall malaise of our times. Ali is one of those rare creatures, an academic historian who has made a fairly successful transition to writing serious novels. His earlier fiction’s playfulness belied the writer’s training and roots, but this latest comes as a reminder of his Oxford/New Left Review background. The protagonist and sometime narrator is Vladimir, a former East German dissident who now finds himself as dismayed by the Germany that followed unification as he was by the half-Germany in which he lived and worked before. Vlady, as he’s often called, has been fired from his teaching post because he still believes in a democratic form of socialism, ironically the same ideal that brought him problems in the DDR. His son Karl is a rising apparatchik in the post-ideological Social Democrats, his wife has left him for reasons that will be revealed only toward novel’s end, and his old friends are dying or changing sides in a discomfiting manner. Vlady’s main response is to try to decipher the mysteries of his recently deceased mother’s past: Was his father a truly heroic figure of the old Communist movement, or something more sinister? What he—ll find, of course, is not what he expected. Ali tells this story in a pervasively melancholy tone leavened by occasional witty details such as a Sotheby’s auction whose centerpiece is a 17th-century silk condom reputed to have belonged to Louis XIV. But he’s too much of a historian to make the people here come to life as characters. Rather, they represent a series of political positions arbitrarily assigned quotas of tics that pass for psychology. Can a thoughtful and well-written novel also be a failure, and a bit of a bore? Here’s the answer.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1998
ISBN: 1-900850-10-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcadia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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