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THE LIQUIDATORS

Name: THE LIQUIDATORS
Author: Tom LeClair
ISBN: 0-9747660-4-6

by Tom LeClair ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 2006

The workingman blues, as if sung by some truck-stop Homer.

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The business of America may be business, but too few fine novels prove it. Here’s a brilliant exception.

All through the Grain Belt, the big trucks roll—Midwest Liquidators, bringing small town marked-down sub-Walmart cast-offs, the kind of junk too cheap for even dollar stores. Like carnies, these fly-by-nights then set up arena shows, where the down-on-their-luck get to bargain binge. LeClair (Passing On, 2004, etc.) makes marvelous poetry of this loser’s game. Tom Bond’s the major pitchman, crowding 60 and weighing 250 pounds, heart none too good and soul jaded. Divorced from brittle ex-lush Elizabeth, Tom wants to pass the flickering torch of the biz on down to son Henry, a milquetoast working for Data Data, or even daughter July, a sort of scolding New Agey ski instructor. And then get out. But he’s trapped by the “… Ninja Turtle backpacks spilling into Hocking microwave cookware, layers of industrial tarps across from stands of beer-logo pool cues.” Trapped, too, by the mixed contempt-regret-pity of the family he’s failed for the sake of the Endless Highway. To the tiny shelf of classic workplace writing—Stanley Elkin’s The Franchisers, Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, Studs Terkel’s nonfiction, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross—add this meditation on failure, fiscal and metaphysical. Forty-three percent of all Yankee merch, LeClair tells us, gets sold by discounters, and this sunset of the economy is sad stuff. LeClair makes his case convincing with characters who whine and lament, but in the tongues of fallen angels. Here’s a retailer waxing forlornly lyrical about his “black-tee-shirt-and-blue-tattoo” demographic: “Driving in their beautiful and trembling automobiles, my customers forget, while their gas lasts, that they are detritus.”

The workingman blues, as if sung by some truck-stop Homer.

Pub Date: May 31, 2006

ISBN: 0-9747660-4-6

Page Count: 220

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LINCOLN'S BILLY
by Tom LeClair

- BOOK REVIEW
WELL-FOUNDED FEAR
by Tom LeClair

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LASHER

by Anne Rice ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1993

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The sequel and conclusion to Rice's The Witching Hour (1990) shows Rice both at her best and at her hackiest. Volume One brought forth the Mayfair Witches, an incestuous family in New Orleans' steamy Garden District, headed by supersurgeon Rowan Mayfair, who is putting some of the family's seven-and-a-half billion into the Mayfair Medical Institute. At that novel's end, Rowan had given birth to an "entity" on the living-room rug that, assuming human shape, had nearly killed husband Michael in the swimming pool, then abducted Rowan. Now the evil being—which looks like Durer's Christ and has been using witches in the Mayfair line to have itself reborn after dying time and again since the earliest days of the Reformation in Scotland— is skipping about Europe while trying to breed with Rowan and give birth to a female demon. But these porny pages don't arrive until we wade through 200 tediously undramatic sheets of dialogue filler quite lacking in storytelling oomph—though we are treated to teenygenius Mona Mayfair's seduction of the recovering Michael. All this is a case of background detail turning story into tapestry. Once Rice plunges us into Rowan's long rape, two miscarriages, and at last the birth of Emaleth, sister/wife for Rowan's demonic son Lasher, the novel lights up with rocket blast. How will Rowan escape her tyrant son, whose endless suckling and inseminating keeps her constantly orgasmic and horrified? But pigging out on Rowan's plight takes up only about 200 pages all told, and then more background filler—well, the novel's huge mythic underpinning- -dims our spirits, although the story of Uncle Julien, as told by Julien's ghost to Michael, dances nicely. Too much Rice-A-Roni, but addicts will lick the pot.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1993

ISBN: 0-679-41295-6

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
RAMSES THE DAMNED
by Anne Rice & Christopher Rice

- BOOK REVIEW
BLOOD COMMUNION
by Anne Rice ; illustrated by Mark Edward Geyer

- BOOK REVIEW
RAMSES THE DAMNED
by Anne Rice & Christopher Rice

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘Mayfair Witches’ Premiere Coming Next Month

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CLOUDSPLITTER

by Russell Banks ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1998

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An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New World (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment (not reviewed). Banks's story takes the form of a series of lengthy letters written, 40 years after Brown's execution, by his surviving son Owen in response to the request of a professor (himself a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison) who is planning a biography of the antislavery martyr. Owen's elaborate tale, frequently interrupted by digressive analyses of his own conflicted feelings about his family's enlistment in their father's cause, traces a pattern of family losses and business failings that seemed only to heighten ``the Old Man's'' fervent belief that he had been chosen by God to lead the slaves to freedom. As we observe the increasingly wrathful actions of Brown, his sons, and his followers, Banks patiently reveals and explores the motivations that will lead to their involvement with the Underground Railroad, the bloody slaughter (by Brown's self-proclaimed ``Army of the North'') of ``pro-slave settlers'' in Kansas, and finally the fateful attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. In many ways, this is very impressive fiction—obviously a painstakingly researched one, with a genuine understanding of both the particulars and the attitudes of its period. The slowly building indirect characterization of ``Father Abraham, making his terrible, final sacrifice to his God'' has some power. But Owen's redundant agonies of conscience (especially regarding his sexual naivetÇ) grow tiresome, and the novel is enormously overlong (e.g., Banks gives us the full nine-page text of a sermon Brown preaches, comparing himself to Job). Cloudsplitter will undoubtedly be much admired. But it penetrates less convincingly into the enigma of John Brown than did a novel half its length, Leonard Ehrlich's God's Angry Man, published 60 years ago. Once again, sadly, Banks's reach has exceeded his grasp. ($125,000 ad/promo; author tour)