Neither disjointed stream-of-consciousness scene changes nor gallons of wine can make a reader care for these characters.
A gardener slices through a backyard phone line in Stratford, Ontario, and a couple of theater people find their marriage disastrously unraveling—in this loose-limbed and hardly convincing latest by loquacious Canadian Findley (Pilgrim, 2000, etc.).
In the Clinton-Lewinsky summer of 1998, Jane Kincaid, originally from a wealthy family in Plantation, Louisiana, is a fairly contented artist and property designer who wants only to be able to buy the house she lives in with her husband, Griffin, a rising actor at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival Theatre, and seven-year-old son Will. Bizarre events—a visit from an old high school boyfriend who then ends up dead in a fiery accident; sexual blackmail by Griff's director Jonathan Crawford, who withholds the best acting parts for sexual favors—send Jane into some heavy drinking of her favorite Australian wine. When the phone line is severed by the gardener, an Adonis enters Jane’s life in the form of the Bell repairman (he’s actually a young Pole named Milos Saworski who has a pious peasant wife and a sick baby), and a sexual crisis is precipitated. As Griffin moves away from her, seduced both by Crawford and by his own ambition, Jane lures the Bell boy to pose naked for her, both parents all the while ignoring son Will and the solicitous eyes of their loyal housekeeper Mercy. Findley is fond of convoluted plotting, but his tale this time around reads like a bored exercise in formula fiction. Variously, Jane’s southern belle background is explored, a local murder introduced, and Shakespeare’s plays analyzed, as if the author were fishing for any next angle to pursue. Moreover, Griffin’s unalloyed treachery in abandoning wife and child seems too evil to be assuaged by the happy ending that’s attendant.
Neither disjointed stream-of-consciousness scene changes nor gallons of wine can make a reader care for these characters.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019472-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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