The workingman blues, as if sung by some truck-stop Homer.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Charming tale, sweet as pie, with a just-right touch of tartness from the bestselling Flagg (Standing in the Rainbow, 2003,...
One more Christmas, one more chance.
Diagnosed with terminal emphysema, Oswald T. Campbell leaves wintry Chicago for a friendly little town in Alabama recommended by his doctor. Lost River seems as good a place as any to spend his last Christmas on earth; and Oswald, a cheerful loser all his life, believes in going with the flow. Turns out that the people of Lost River are a colorful bunch: Roy Grimmit, the strapping owner of the grocery/bait/beer store, hand-feeds a rescued fledgling named Jack (the redbird of the title) and doesn’t care who thinks he’s a sissy. Many of the local women belong to the Mystic Order of the Royal Polka Dots, which does good things on the sly, like fixing up unattached men. Betty Kitchen, former army nurse, coaxes Oswald’s life story out of him. Seems he was an orphan named for a can of soup—could there be anything sadder? Oswald is quite taken with the charms of Frances Cleverdon, who has a fabulous collection of gravy boats and a pink kitchen, too. Back to Jack, the redbird: it’s a favorite of Patsy, a crippled little girl abandoned by her worthless parents. She’ll be heartbroken when she finds out that Jack died, so the townsfolk arrange for a minor miracle. Will they get it? Yes—and snow for Christmas, too.
Charming tale, sweet as pie, with a just-right touch of tartness from the bestselling Flagg (Standing in the Rainbow, 2003, etc).Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6304-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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