Self-conscious, strained myth-making clots a good story.
A near-epic saga aims for the literary stratosphere, but its purple prose drags it down.
Homely, hyper-sensitive daughter of gorgeous parents, Gussie Locke is a wanderer. Haywood (The Rest of the Earth, 1997, etc.) ladles her full of scrappy spirit as she careens westward, fleeing prairie Minnesota for wild Wyoming. Repulsed as a teen by the sight of her dad zestfully rolling in a bog with a woman not his wife, she sets out with her mother Leota, a kind of Nordic goddess. Elusive men become her signature cross to bear: She trysts briefly with a soldier and bears his child. He departs, as do virtually all the significant people in her life. Eventually, with her only companions her daughter and a cinematically rendered restless wind, she settles in Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin, there to run supplies for oil and mineral crews. Daughter Anne becomes Gussie in spades—another wide-eyed seeker constantly on the run, pawn of an over-heated sensibility. Beginning in 1903, the tale spans the century, and Hayward evokes period detail with relish, from the sputter of early motor coaches to the parched throats of ranchers during Prohibition. The evocative, the lyrical, the descriptive, in fact, is his keynote: “She’d lift a page with a gentle pinch of her fingers, tun it, lay open the next horizon, the next event, without fear, without a moment’s pause, her voice going on as if the lovely shaping of her lips were the whole act, as if it was all music without meaning.” Such over-ripe poetry is sweet in sips; Hayward almost drowns us in the stuff. And characters who are closer to archetypal crags than flesh-and-blood people don’t help his tale, either.
Self-conscious, strained myth-making clots a good story.Pub Date: April 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03491-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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