The story covers small territory, but it explores it in an insightful, amiable way.
Fried’s second novel (My Father’s Fighter, 2004) is a smart account of a New Yorker’s mid-life musings.
September 11th has passed and Bush is about to invade Iraq, but what’s really troubling Joseph Steiner is that, at 49, he has managed to lose his job as a TV executive. He knew the lay-offs were coming, but forewarning hardly compensates for the emasculation of middle-age joblessness. On a whim, he and his wife Mary, a left-wing publisher, accept an offer to join friends for Christmas in Paris, giving Joseph an opportunity to lick his wounds. Judith and Tad, American journalists stationed in Paris, have been sent to the frontlines to cover the war, and Joseph and Mary get to stay at their posh Saint Germain apartment and shop the Boulevard. The suspicion that his friends are leading better, more meaningful lives is reinforced when he meets up with other old buddies: Johnny, an American ex-pat involved in edgy Parisian theater and the recent recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, and Gilles, a handsome doctor married to a bestselling Irish author. As dinner discussions revolve around trite topics like Karl Lagerfeld’s newly slim figure, unhappy Joseph contemplates his own slightly pallid life, remembering his days as a reticent and self-conscious student in Paris. As their holiday comes to an end, Joseph and Mary have Christmas dinner at Gilles’s country chateau, where Joseph is confronted by an angry economist, whose harsh words—that Joseph is an emotional infant, a trait common among Americans—rings painfully true.
The story covers small territory, but it explores it in an insightful, amiable way.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-114-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.
Christian-fiction writer Martin (The Dead Don’t Dance, not reviewed) chronicles the personal tragedy of a Georgia heart surgeon.
Five years ago in Atlanta, Reese could not save his beloved wife Emma from heart failure, even though the Harvard-trained surgeon became a physician so that he could find a way to fix his childhood sweetheart’s congenitally faulty ticker. He renounced practicing medicine after her death and now lives in quiet anonymity as a boat mechanic on Lake Burton. Across the lake is Emma’s brother Charlie, who was rendered blind on the same desperate night that Reese fought to revive his wife on their kitchen floor. When Reese helps save the life of a seven-year-old local girl named Annie, who turns out to have irreparable heart damage, he is compassionately drawn into her case. He also grows close to Annie’s attractive Aunt Cindy and gradually comes to recognize that the family needs his expertise as a transplant surgeon. Martin displays some impressive knowledge about medical practice and the workings of the heart, but his Christian message is not exactly subtle. “If anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart,” Reese notes of his medical studies. Emma’s letters (kept in a bank vault) quote Bible verse; Charlie elucidates stories of Jesus’ miracles for young Annie; even the napkins at the local bar, The Well, carry passages from the Gospel of John for the benefit of the biker clientele. Moreover, Martin relentlessly hammers home his sentimentality with nature-specific metaphors involving mating cardinals and crying crickets. (Annie sells crickets as well as lemonade to raise money for her heart surgery.) Reese’s habitual muttering of worldly slogans from Milton and Shakespeare (“I am ashes where once I was fire”) doesn’t much cut the cloying piety, and an over-the-top surgical save leaves the reader feeling positively bruised.
Deep schmaltz in the Bible Belt.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-5955-4054-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: WestBow/Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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