An insouciant antipastoral as bracing and bitter as a January nor’easter. Don’t miss it.
Archie Bunker would look like Ralph Nader alongside the robust, profane life force who easily dominates this zesty, entertaining second novel by the Maine poet and author (A Keeper of Sheep, 1994).
He’s Lucas “Lucky” Lunt, a native of fictional Orphan Point who has survived both Vietnam and a bad ticker, spent 30 years leading the hard life of an independent lobster fisherman, and has just about had it with rival lobstermen, tightfisted middleman Clyde Hannaford, and Lucky’s increasingly combative family: wife Sarah, who’s become an “artist” producing “little sea glass sculptures”; smart-mouthed college-age daughter Kristen; and 20-year-old skinhead high-school dropout Kyle, who gives evidence of being uneducable, unemployable, mad at the world, and gay. As if this isn’t enough, Lucky hires Clyde’s estranged sexpot wife Ronette as “stern man” aboard (his boat) The Wooden Nickel, gets her pregnant, splits with Sarah, and fires a “warning shot” that goes astray during a “lobster war” over disputed fishing areas. As a result, Lucky is courted by an affable ex-con plotting to burgle rich out-of-staters’ houses and by wily Mr. Moto, who specializes in marketing illegal oversized “Godzilla lobsters” and whale meat. Carpenter keeps his busy plot boiling, as Lucky and Ronette encounter a nasty cetacean tangled in fishing lines, then must survive a rescue by a boatful of horny rednecks. It all reads as if Carolyn Chute had moved eastward to the coast, or Richard Russo’s townies had grown extra layers of grit and cussedness. And Lucky is a terrific creation: ribald, cranky, deeply conservative, homophobic, xenophobic, irrationally violent—and the unquenchable source of malevolently funny one-liners that can drop you dead in your tracks (dealing with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant, for example, is “like going after a dog turd with a pair of oars”).
An insouciant antipastoral as bracing and bitter as a January nor’easter. Don’t miss it.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-13400-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
On a canvas stretched from Manchuria to Malta, and with sound effects from strange birdcalls to sleigh bells in cyberspace,...
Not merely a big book from the broadly respected Murakami (Dance Dance Dance, 1994, etc.), but a major work bringing signature themes of alienation, dislocation, and nameless fears through the saga of a gentle man forced to trade the familiar for the utterly unknown.
Narrator Toru Okada quit his law-office job in Tokyo. Then he and his wife Kumiko lost their cat. Then Kumiko goes to work one day, and he never sees her again. The loss is overwhelming, but when two psychic sisters take an interest in Okada, to the point of entering his dreams, and a teenage neighbor shares with him her obsession with death, to the point of almost killing him, Okada realizes he's into something over his head. Of course, if he hadn't climbed into the dry well of a nearby vacant house, the teenager wouldn't have had a chance to get at him—and neither would he have had an out-of-body experience that left him with a bluish mark the size of a baby's palm on his cheek. And if he hadn't heard the chilling reminiscence of an old soldier who'd been thrown by his captors into a well in the Mongolian desert at the start of WW II, he never would have wanted to see for himself what a well-bottom was like. And if he hadn't married Kumiko, he wouldn't have the ire of her powerful, venomous brother now turned on him. And yet even so, suddenly, subtly, Okada's fortunes change: Brought through the mark on his cheek into an alliance with another team of psychics, this one mother and son, he acquires the vacant house and its well- -and moves deliberately toward a confrontation with the evil that took Kumiko away and all but destroyed him.
On a canvas stretched from Manchuria to Malta, and with sound effects from strange birdcalls to sleigh bells in cyberspace, this is a fully mature, engrossing tale of individual and national destinies entwined. It will be hard to surpass.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44669-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Robinson has composed, with its cascading perfections of symbols, a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and...
The wait since 1981 and Housekeeping is over. Robinson returns with a second novel that, however quiet in tone and however delicate of step, will do no less than tell the story of America—and break your heart.
A reverend in tiny Gilead, Iowa, John Ames is 74, and his life is at its best—and at its end. Half a century ago, Ames’s first wife died in childbirth, followed by her new baby daughter, and Ames, seemingly destined to live alone, devoted himself to his town, church, and people—until the Pentecost Sunday when a young stranger named Lila walked into the church out of the rain and, from in back, listened to Ames’s sermon, then returned each Sunday after. The two married—Ames was 67—had a son, and life began all over again. But not for long. In the novel’s present (mid-1950s), Ames is suffering from the heart trouble that will soon bring his death. And so he embarks upon the writing of a long diary, or daily letter—the pages of Gilead—addressed to his seven-year-old son so he can read it when he’s grown and know not only about his absent father but his own history, family, and heritage. And what a letter it is! Not only is John Ames the most kind, observant, sensitive, and companionable of men to spend time with, but his story reaches back to his patriarchal Civil War great-grandfather, fiery preacher and abolitionist; comes up to his grandfather, also a reverend and in the War; to his father; and to his own life, spent in his father’s church. This long story of daily life in deep Middle America—addressed to an unknown and doubting future—is never in the slightest way parochial or small, but instead it evokes on the pulse the richest imaginable identifying truths of what America was.
Robinson has composed, with its cascading perfections of symbols, a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-15389-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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