Three sisters react to their mother's recent death and the unexpected return of the father who left home 30 years earlier—in Collier's second effort, which, unfortunately, shares the problems of her first (A Cooler Climate, 1990): you can see the wheels turning, but there's just no traction. Lois, the oldest sister—rigid, controlled, and determinedly conformist—works efficiently on clearing out her mother's house and dividing the property fairly, all the while consumed with worry about her son Ned, who's dropped out of college to live on the fringe of society. Diane, a few years younger than Lois and still single, is a successful freelance writer and chain-smoker who agonizes over commitment. Should she agree to marry Adam, the kind, intelligent, honest, and attractive man who loves her? Ella, the youngest sister, is retarded. Her reaction to the death of the mother who was devoted to her is simple grief. She spends hours in the rocking chair in her mother's bedroom, rocking, rocking. Into all this walks 70-year-old Charlie Hazzard, jazz musician and erstwhile father. Charlie lights up the house—and the novel. He's the most substantial character here, and his conflicts over his two lives ring true. But before things can really be resolved, Collier dispatches him to a final—and premature—fate. Without him, the storyline falls to pieces. The three self-involved sisters, cut out with a heavy hand, end up being paper-doll-thin. Their stylized, almost archaic way of speaking also distances them from us. ``My, you're a cool customer'' is Lois's response to Charlie's request for a cup of coffee when he first arrives at their door. ``Sorry we weren't expecting the return of the prodigal father or we'd have laid in a stock.'' Strong words, weak message—in all, a bitter brew.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1513-6
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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