DIAMOND HEAD

by Peter Gilman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 1960

Advance publicity- Columbia Pictures purchase before publication- and a fast-moving narrative, into which is packed practically everything one could expect about modern Hawaii, virtually insure popular success for this first novel. Peter Gilman writes of modern Hawaii from a sound background of newspaper experience with the Honolulu Star Bulletin and the Associated Press in Hawaii. He writes quite obviously out of an obsession with the beauty of the islands, a deep concern over the dislocations economically, the power wielded by the Big Five, the crooked politics played by the stateside Union leaders, determined to make a political football of the economy of the islands, and an awareness of the underlying issues of race in what outwardly is a paradise of acceptance. At times his determination to clarify the various facets clouds a first rate story pattern. He has missed no opportunity to inject the historical background, the viewpoint of now one side, now another. Nor- unfortunately- has he bypassed any opportunity to elaborate and particularize the somewhat distorted sexual aspects of his situations. The central love story involves Sloan Howland, whose father is fighting for Statehood- and his place as Senator in Washington, and Paul Kahana, a native Hawaiian, with whom she has been brought up and knows herself deeply, obsessively in love. On their wedding day, her brother Aaron, an alcoholic and a profoundly unhappy, dislocated man, kills Paul in a brawl over his own involvement with a native woman. The story moves fast from Sloan and Paul's return from schooling in the States through to the fact of her marriage to Paul's brother to legitimatize her child, and embraces the violence of labor brawls, of political wars, of the volcanic eruption that destroyed vast areas of the island, including the Howland holdings. Undoubtedly there will be comparisons made with Michener's Hawaii (which this reader thinks a much finer book)- and Peyton Place. And on both scores, it rates sales if not critical acceptance.

Pub Date: June 24, 1960

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Coward-McCann

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1960

Categories: FICTION