Those who aren’t sure what they’re in for with Palahniuk won’t want to start here.
Beneath the glamour of Hollywood lies an ineffable sadness, a commonplace notion that this occasionally amusing novel both belabors and mocks.
As the cult master of high-concept fictional subversion, the prolific Palahniuk (Pygmy, 2009, etc.) has his typical fun here, though the thinness of character and lack of narrative momentum that are part of the plan might try the reader’s patience. Within “this silly motion picture we call human history,” the tarnished heroine is aging Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, whose riveting violet eyes and multiple marriages might tempt some to recall Elizabeth Taylor. The narrator is Hazie Coogan, who tells the story in terms of acts and scenes, with flashbacks and voice-overs. And who is Hazie? Not exactly a housekeeper or personal assistant to Miss Kathie. Perhaps a confidante or nursemaid. Certainly the second banana. “I was Thelma Ritter before Thelma Ritter was Thelma Ritter,” she writes, or rather Palahniuk writes, only in the novel each reference to Thelma Ritter is in boldface. As is every other proper name, most of them recognizable (“Lilly” Hellman, Coco Chanel, Ronald Reagan), and product name. Both the novel’s title and the boldface recall the golden age of the gossip columnist, with the author having great sport with the wordplay that once filled the columns of Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper and the like. Every ex-husband, of whom Miss Kathie has many, is a “was-band,” while a book about such a star might be a “bile-ography.” As a younger Lothario vies to become the next Mr. Kathie, he is writing a memoir that will be far more marketable after her death. Or is he? Among the meta-fictional challenges the reader must confront within this narrative within a narrative within a narrative is what kind of book is Hazie writing (and we are reading). Meanwhile, the wordplay amuses.
Those who aren’t sure what they’re in for with Palahniuk won’t want to start here.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52635-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.
Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan’s meditation on the fallen South.
Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names “Mudbound.” Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry’s enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father’s wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm’s tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked—but the innocent suffer as well. “Sometimes it’s necessary to do wrong,” claims Jamie McAllan in the book’s equivocal dénouement. “Sometimes it’s the only way to make things right.”
The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executed novel.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-569-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but...
A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham—whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world.
As conceived in this second historical by novelist McLain (The Paris Wife, 2011, etc.), Markham—nee Beryl Clutterbuck—is the neglected daughter of an impecunious racehorse trainer who fails to make a go at farming in British East Africa and a feckless, squeamish mother who bolts back to England with their older son. Set on her own two feet early, she is barely schooled but precociously brave and wired for physical challenges—a trait honed by her childhood companion Kibii (a lifelong friend and son of a local chief). In the Mau forest—“before Kenya was Kenya”—she finds a “heaven fitted exactly to me.” Keeping poised around large mammals (a leopard and a lion also figure significantly) is in her blood and later gains her credibility at the racecourse in Nairobi, where she becomes the youngest trainer ever licensed. Statuesque, blonde, and carrying an air of self-sufficiency—she marries, disastrously, at 16 but is granted a separation to train Lord Delamere’s bloodstock—Beryl turns heads among the cheerfully doped and dissolute Muthaiga Club set (“I don’t know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here”), charms not one but two heirs to the British crown at Baroness Karen Blixen’s soiree, and sets her cap on Blixen’s lover, Denys Fitch Hatton. She’ll have him, too, and much enjoyment derives from guessing how that script, and other intrigues, will play out in McLain’s retelling. Fittingly, McLain has Markham tell her story from an altitude of 1,800 feet: “I’m meant to do this,” she begins, “stitch my name on the sky.” Popularly regarded as “a kind of Circe” (to quote Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman), the young woman McLain explores owns her mistakes (at least privately) and is more boxed in by class, gender assumptions, and self-doubt than her reputation as aviatrix, big game hunter, and femme fatale suggests.
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night “bloody wonderful.” Readers might even say the same of McLain’s sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53418-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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