Thomas Wolfe's determined stab at a richly finished short novel on the order of Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby attempts a passionately deeper cut at American life than Fitzgerald's. Wolfe (1900-38), in fact, has James Joyce in mind and imitates many of the storytelling devices of Ulysses as he tells this story of a Park Avenue party being given by a Broadway stage designer, Esther Jack (Wolfe's mistress, Aline Bernstein), focusing as well on her stockbroker husband, Fritz Jack. Wolfe also makes the Jacks's Park Avenue building symbolic of the American economy and blue-collar class. Famed folk show up disguised by Wolfe, mobilist Alexander Calder being savaged as Piggy Logan, a boor who works a circus made of wire figures. More fiercely descriptive paint than plot, this novella—refined for seven years, beginning in 1930—gives us concentrated Wolfe. Bloody chunks of it appeared posthumously in Scribner's Monthly and You Can't Go Home Again, though over half has never before seen print. Aside from Tom Wolfe (the other one) and Norman Mailer, no stylist today takes as big a bite out of the American landscape. Penn State professor Stutman (English & American studies) also edited Wolfe's The Good Child's River (1992) and My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein (1983); coeditor Idol (English/Clemson Univ.) compiled A Thomas Wolfe Companion.
Pub Date: April 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-8078-2206-X
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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
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