A tart but ultimately hollow portrait of a narcissist parading toward hubris.
A retired British diplomat uses his newly acquired free time to explore the mysteries of his own mind.
There’s an air of absurdity that buoys but can’t save this bizarre debut novel by Balding, longtime chief executive officer of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. We meet our protagonist, Victor Andrews, as he prepares to undergo an angioplasty at the age of 50. Perhaps it’s the shadow of his own mortality at play, but subsequently, this very British creature of habit begins to ponder all manner of things—the psyche of mass murderers is a recurring motif, as are sex, atheism, and the nature of reality. It’s probably best that Victor is given to long soliloquies, as his only real companions are his lady friend, Helen, a psychoanalyst, and a newly acquired parrot, Yorick. Among Victor’s myriad theories is the idea that should humans achieve total objectivity, they might expand their consciousness to the point they mutate into a new species, hence the title. It is fitfully funny at times—for all his loquacious speeches, our man is an utter horndog who spends more time pondering his manhood than his humanity. “You penetrate me like a solemn god entering his temple” could easily qualify for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Victor also spends half the book trying to teach Yorick to say things like “God is dead,” to the point the whole enterprise feels like an overly cerebral but interminable Monty Python skit. Close followers of philosophy may find some value in all this cerebral navel-gazing as Victor prattles on, name-checking Pascal, Kafka, and Nietzsche, among others. Most readers may feel more like Helen does when she asks, “What’s actually the matter with you? It’s as though your head had cracked open and you were picking out pieces of your brain and examining them for sense.”
A tart but ultimately hollow portrait of a narcissist parading toward hubris.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935830-46-7
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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