An intricately plotted, very interesting first novel that intermittently echoes both Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman while patiently tracing a disgraced artist’s arduous path toward some sort of authenticity in his personal life. Seattle photographer (and art historian) Robert Armour unwittingly committed fraud when he brokered the sale of several erotic photographs falsely represented to him as the work of Edward Weston. A chance to restore his reputation arises when Robert discovers, in the home of “rich no-talent” amateur painter Judith Lund, a set of photographic plates he instantly recognizes as the work of Chinese-American master Wilfred Eng, a revered landscape photographer whose deepest energies had been dedicated to “portraying the racial imbalance in America.” The negatives that Robert has stumbled onto are nudes, studies of Ellen McFarland, the young wife of a San Francisco millionaire—and, as had been previously disclosed, in a titillating “scholarly” volume (Love Diary of a San Francisco Lady), Wilfred Eng’s lover. Orton’s tricky narrative deftly balances the intrigues into which Robert’s scheme to market the negatives quickly plunges him—and which also involve Robert’s divorced Diane Mays and her young son “Budge,” a duplicitous colleague (Parker Lange) and his twin mistresses, the wrathful Judith, and the profit-motivated Eng descendants—against the plaintive testimony of Ellen McFarland’s candid meditative outpourings (of which there’s rather more than initially meets the eye, so to speak), and the eventually revealed truth about Wilfred Eng’s real feelings toward the wife of a plutocrat who represented everything the reformer in Eng had hated. A clever, highly informed dramatization of the truth that Robert Armour thinks only he understands: “If old photography taught any lesson it was that no one could live without the past, even if they [sic] wanted to.” An unusual and beguiling debut performance.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58243-023-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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