The ramblings overtake the journey in short order, but fortunately Pearson knows how to string a tale—just not when to quit.
Another shaggy-dog tale from Pearson (Polar, 2002, etc.), past master of the Southern Gothic.
It would be unfair to call Pearson’s tale a yarn—it’s more a Big Ball of String, unraveling without end but never seeming to diminish. Naturally, it’s set in a small town in Virginia, where we follow our hero, middle-aged accountant Paul Tatum, as he makes his daily rounds among the great and the good of his little hometown. Paul still makes house calls, so he has privileged insights into the lives of his clients and picks up plenty of gossip about everybody else. Guns and sex provide most of the entertainment for spectators, and it’s the rare home that doesn’t have some such domestic turmoil on view: Even Paul’s misanthropic neighbor Stoney (a recluse and autodidact who repairs things for a living between PBS shows) turns out to have broken the heart of some other man’s wife, as Paul learned in a dry goods store from two elderly ladies who noticed him staring at the wife in question. Paul has had a girlfriend of sorts for some time now—a divorced mother named Mona, who belongs to a storefront Episcopal church and practices Tantra on the side—but he is strongly taken by the wife in the dry goods store, whose name turns out to be Maud. Unhappily married to a thuggish brute, Maud inspires pity as well as love in Paul, who sets out to rescue her. Toward this end, he enlists the help of Stoney, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Carpaccio’s painting of St. George, which Paul saw in Venice when he was there on vacation with Mona, who’d spent her honeymoon there years ago, before her daughter Dinky was born. Stoney agrees to help, but there are a few complications (and more than a few digressions) involved.
The ramblings overtake the journey in short order, but fortunately Pearson knows how to string a tale—just not when to quit.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03238-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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