Written with skill and humor—and with a vulpine eye that sees much and winks often.
Stretching credulity to the snapping point, Rips searches for (and finds) a mysterious black woman who appears in some drawings executed by the author’s father and discovered only after his death.
Employing images that Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor might well have declined to use in their fiction (too outrageous), Rips (Pasquale’s Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town, 2001) regales us with the antics of his fun-house family out in the Central Plains. Samples: a neighbor named Ronald has sex with a chicken that subsequently appears on the dinner menu. The author’s grandparents operated a brothel. The author as a little boy climbs into bed with his dead nanny. At the circus, Rips and his father see a performer fall to her death. A childhood friend named David has sex with his mother and then years later—mad—removes his own face. An employee in his father’s eyeglass factory affixes an artificial penis to his cowboy boot and is thereby popular with the women. A man, digging graves in the crater of a volcano, survives an eruption, losing only his jaw in the process. A many-days-dead body falls through the ceiling of a coffee shop where the author is sitting. A tornado sucks his grandmother through a basement garbage chute up into the kitchen. It seems currently fashionable in memoir to smudge the ever-vague line between fact and fiction (if you haven’t experienced some bestiality or boozy child-abuse, what chance do you have for publication?), but Rips’s adventures will cause readers to wonder whether there is any difference. Rips continually tries to spread a layer of respectability and even erudition on his narrative cracker, so we’re invited to wonder what Sartre might have thought of all of this, and there are earnest allusions to Ajax, Ionesco, and Herodotus.
Written with skill and humor—and with a vulpine eye that sees much and winks often.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-27352-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
