Sandlin’s seventh novel (after Honey Don’t, not reviewed) has some lively flourishes, but the one-note humor quickly palls.
Ancient hippies, defying mortality, rise up against the administrators of their retirement community in this near-future black comedy.
Poor Guy Fontaine. Momentarily disoriented after his wife’s death, the spry 72-year-old drives his cart off a California golf course and onto an interstate. That one lapse allows his daughter Claudia to take control of his assets and bundle him into the Mission Pescadero, which provides, in the year 2022, both A.L. (Assisted Living) and N.C. (Nursing Care), meaning heavy sedation. Guy, a native Oklahoman and former sports editor, is an anomaly in this coastal California institution, most of whose residents are former hippies trapped in their memories of the Summer of Love (1967) or the 1969 confrontation at Berkeley; they still hunger for multiple sex partners (“monogamy is so . . . Eisenhower”). But Guy does find a kindred spirit in Roxanne, known as Rocky, who got a life as a waitress after the hippie scene faded. Sandlin gives these two a full measure of humanity (and his best writing), while treating the other residents as decrepit freaks (one has a face that “looks like a potato that’s been stored under the sink too long”). When administrator Alexandra Truman, a bitchy disciplinarian, confiscates one old geezer’s cat (house rule: no pets), Guy defends him, decking a staff member. The rebellion is underway, led by a canny crone with a walker who’s reliving her days as a ’60s militant. She outwits law enforcement (the hippie-hating Lieutenant Monk) tactically and strategically (“Our power is our age”), though she can’t prevent an anarchic resident spiking the community’s tea with acid. When Monk, armed to the teeth, goes berserk, the cat-owner heroically disables him, dying in the process. The female governor arrives and sides with the residents; as a tribute to their fallen comrade, they all drop their skirts or pants—the novel’s second mass-mooning.
Sandlin’s seventh novel (after Honey Don’t, not reviewed) has some lively flourishes, but the one-note humor quickly palls.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-59448-933-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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