Robbins's wordy, phantasmagoric smorgasbord reveals a master chef filigreeing and flaying with utmost skill, But hungry readers will ultimately wonder, "Where's the beef?" His latest multilayered, zeitgeist-rich romp (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1976, etc.) focuses on Gwendolyn, a money-obsessed Seattle stockbroker we meet on the day the market crashes. That same day Gwendolyn's boyfriend's born-again, formerly thieving pet monkey runs away; an arrogant tall dark stranger, an ex-stockbroker who has rectal cancer and who has come back from Africa with cosmic knowledge as to why frogs are disappearing around the world, insinuates himself into her life; her best friend/psychic, a 300-pound woman, vanishes into thin air; and a mysterious Japanese doctor comes to town to tell the world about his simple cure for colon cancer. Over the weekend Gwendolyn tries to find the monkey and her friend; at the same time she must choose between running off with the stranger, or staying with her stable boyfriend and salvaging her ruined career. Robbins mixes his trademark lighthearted turns of phrase — "the way he pronounces your name, like William S. Burroughs ordering a root beer float, sends a shudder through your lungs" — with a plot that involves global issues like environmental and economic degradation, cancer and AIDS, violence between rich and poor. But some of the serious threads are used solely to lead the reader to shaggy-dog potty jokes. The all-knowing, smug narrator tells us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and mystic solutions are hinted at, but all we get is a leering, smiley-face conclusion that says, Don't worry be happy, drop out, cure yourself, go get stoned in some far off place, and hope that you will have a cosmic revelation. Fans may initially be enthralled by a literary Oz's grand, terrifying show, but there's nothing but a smirking stoner behind the curtain.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-553-07625-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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