A movie novel of tremendous sweep and detail, zapping us with the America of the Thirties and Forties as seen through the eyes of gossip-monger Walter Winchell. Herr, the jivey author of Dispatches (1977), undertakes a spacious picture of US society in pre- and post-WW II and nails it all down in 156 pages. This tour de force presents itself as a movie script, with synoptic montages, scene cuts, and dialogue in script form. Its compression releases a great brio to the page, sends a flow of images racing over the reader's mind, and strips to bare bone a form first handled by John Steinbeck in his novelizations of The Moon Is Down and Of Mice and Men. All these storytelling smarts would get Herr by on their own, but he reaches masterfully beyond mere form by invoking our sympathy for the kind of "great villain" Henry Fielding drew so delightfully in Jonathan Wild Few would think that Broadway columnist Walter Winchell would lend himself to such treatment. But Herr limns Citizen Winchell from childhood to old age with deep understanding, and achieves a peak of pure energy with Winchell lording it at the Stork Club and rat-a-tat-tatting his radio show. Not only does Winchell stride off the page with his compulsions edged and shaded to perfection, but his cronies as well receive strong treatment: affecting scenes abound with Winchell's great buddy sportswriter Damon Runyon, Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley, and press agent Irving Hoffman (read Irving "Swifty" Lazar?) that ink themselves forever into memory—as does Herr's brilliantly realized Chorus of Press Agents groveling at Walter's feet when he is King and bad-mouthing him when he is at last a wandering Broadway ghost. Sumptuous entertainment.
Pub Date: May 18, 1990
ISBN: 0679733930
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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