Sometimes choppy narrative, ditto tiresome dialogue, and ponderous chapter headings (“As They Flee You’d Think They Float on...
Despite flaws, this second from Nissen (The Good People of New York, 2001), about alcohol-sodden year-rounders on a resort island in the Northeast, shows that she can deliver a compelling and layered tale.
Osprey Island in the summer of 1988 is home to an inbred ensemble of characters centered on a family-oriented hotel. Bud and Nancy, who run the Lodge, are at odds with their rebellious daughter Suzi, who’s vacationing there with her six-year-old daughter, Mia. Lorna and Lance, the Lodge’s housekeeper and head of maintenance, seem to be drinking themselves to death while neglecting their son Squee, age eight. Roddy, who grew up with Lance and Suzi but left the island for a while, is back, working at the Lodge. Gavin, a wealthy California kid, has followed his Stanford girlfriend back home to the island to work as a waiter in a Dirty Dancing reversal, only to be dumped for her high-school boyfriend. Brigid and Peg, two young Irishwomen with summer jobs at the Lodge, have come to the island in search of adventure. Nissen starts with some roiling family secrets (Did Roddy go to Vietnam or not? Who’s the father of Lorna’s child? Of Suzi’s? Why does Eden know so much?), adds booze and libido, and sets off impressive fireworks. Suzi is drawn to Roddy; Brigid has her eye on Lance but goes after Gavin. Lorna, drunk, falls asleep with a lit cigarette and dies in the laundry shack as it burns down around her. Unmoored, Lance indulges his violent streak. And, in a particularly well-drawn take on an island’s collective awareness, everyone wonders: What will happen to Squee?
Sometimes choppy narrative, ditto tiresome dialogue, and ponderous chapter headings (“As They Flee You’d Think They Float on Wings”) don’t quite obscure Nissen’s acute sense of the messy ambivalence of love, while her depiction of a child’s grief is heartbreaking. A perfectly satisfying if imperfect summertime read.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41146-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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