First-time novelist Baker makes it to the playoffs with this neo-mythic entry in a baseball subgenre pioneered by Bernard Malamud (The Natural) and advanced by George Plimpton (The Curious Case of Sidd Finch): the story of the rookie from nowhere who blossoms into the greatest player in the history of the game. This time out, the Ruthian giant is one John Barr, a tall, taciturn stranger with ``drowned man's eyes'' who hitchhikes to Hell's Gate, Virginia—home of a New York Mets minor-league franchise—muttering only that ``I came to play.'' So he does, like a dervish in spikes, and takes the sport by storm. Baker unfolds Barr's story through a patchwork of first-person voices, most of them just this side of the nuthouse. There's Rapid Rickey Falls, (``The Old Swizzlehead''), a philandering black slugger who becomes Barr's main ally; Ellsworth Pippin, the patronizing, parsimonious owner of the Mets; Ol' Cal Rigby, a Casey Stengelish manager who carries his false eyes in a box; Stillwater Norman, the dumbest man alive, who dies from choking on a clam; and their peers, the team-as-human-zoo, flashing spikes and bedding groupies with adolescent glee. Sparked by Barr, the crew wins seven pennants and five World Series, the key games recounted by Old Swizzlehead and other voices with high-five thrills. None of these victories, however, teases so much as a smile from the stolid, enigmatic Barr. Herein lies a mystery: What engine drives this strange superstar who avoids girls, disdains money, stays locked within himself? Miniskirted Ellie Jay, ``The Queen of Sportswriters,'' probes without avail. The reader learns the secret, however, in the book's only gaffe—a series of somber, overripe Freudian flashbacks that situate Barr's icy talent in his violence-strewn childhood. Barring the Freudian glop, baseball as it's meant to be.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59088-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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