A profound tale, with its profundity couched in irreligious humor.
The award-winning author of The Prince of West End Avenue (1994), among others, stays true to form with this immensely funny and sad story about the slippery road to identity.
The narrator is Edmond Music, an errant Catholic priest, born a French Jew. At one point, the erudite Edmond explains that priesthood is but a job: “Hypocrisy is a constant of the human condition, unavoidable, as necessary to our well-being as meat and drink.” So he lives well at Beale Hall, an English country estate, where he reflects on human behavior with the aid of arcane or about-to-be arcane books and thoughts, particularly those of Solomon Reuben Hayyim Falsch, the Pish, and William Shakespeare, the Bard. The story opens with Edmond in a bar contemplating the announcement that he’s been killed in a freak automobile accident, driving his “modest Morris Minor of a certain age, into the famous Stuart Oak of the Beale estate.” It turns out that the badly mangled victim was Trevor Stuffins, a local worker. Edmond sips his Calvados and toys with the idea that the Vatican may have sent henchmen who fiddled with his brakes, causing the accident, because the Vatican wants to remove him from his grand digs. Soon Edmond is involved in a contest of wits with his lifelong enemy, the American priest Fred Twombly, who calls him SJ (for “secret Jew”). Twombly has finally found the means to bring Edmond down: he’s stumbled upon knowledge of a priceless Shakespeare folio, possibly missing from Beale Hall’s fabulous library, entitled Dyuers and Sondry Sonettes. Edmond feints, seeking solutions to the problems raised by the missing folio in his Pishiana collection, while others—especially his unhappy lover, housekeeper Maude; his aging dangerously factotum, Father Bastien; and the vile Twombly—keep the action moving at a brisk pace. All the characters are superbly realized, but Edmond, a man battling with himself at the close of his life, is the most engaging.
A profound tale, with its profundity couched in irreligious humor.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-8620
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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