Neither the pre-publication publicity nor Coover's exuberant word-riffs can conceal the tiny-mindedness behind this rewrite of early-1950s American history as comic-book mytho-fantasy. The "public burning" is the Ethel & Julius Rosenberg electrocution, here transformed into the Times Square vaudeville-rally that everyone—dodo Ike, "Boy Judge" Kaufman, prosecutor Saypol, and folksy, ballsy "Superhero" Uncle Sam himself—is bloodthirstily, Yahoo-istically waiting for. Justice Douglas' stay-of-execution creates a delay: time for the pinko servants of Sam's arch-enemy ("the Phantom!") to march and picket. And time for pathetic, paranoid Veep R. Nixon, who narrates every other chapter, to rehash the case; to detect parallels between the Rosenberg and Nixon family histories; to realize that "Eth" and "Julie" are "taking the rap for somebody else"; and to lose himself in masturbatory fantasies of earthy Ethel. As the execution-day gala commences—public spanking of Douglas, skits based on the Rosenberg Death House Letters by Astaire & Rogers, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers—Nixon rushes to Sing-Sing for an erotic encounter with Ethel ("Richard, I could eat you in sheer extremity of feeling!"), tries to divert the the death-hungry Times Sq. horde ("everbody "drop his pants for America!"), precipitates an apocalyptic mob scene, and—after the electrocutions take place as scheduled—is initiated into America's power elite via sodomy by Uncle Sam: a "rendyvoos with destiny ain't no beanbag!" As a novella (the author's original intent), this ingenious scenario would flare, stun, and leave its mark. But Coover's inflationary technique—reduce to a one-liner and then free-associate, allude, and expand like crazy—belabors and betrays the essential gimcrack design. The tone of righteous sarcasm becomes a drone. Chunks of the public record are jazzily ornamented and tossed in. Juicy zingers about TIME and the N.Y. Times are whipped into the consistency of poured concrete. With no human moorings (for all the psycho-portraiture, RMN never graduates from gimmick to character), Coover skids between easy-target satire (Bruce, Sahl, et al. were there first) and melodramatic grandstanding, with no new insights worthy of his remarkable rhetorical talents. A provocative kernel lost in a dazzling, deadening morass: precisely the kind of book more likely to be talked about than read.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1977
ISBN: 0802135277
Page Count: 564
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 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.
