A coming-of-age tale that bridges cultural gaps with sincerity and laughs.
In this debut novel, a white suburban teenager runs a car detailing service in 1960s California, finding among his employees a mentor in a charismatic, Southern black man.
Steven Reilly’s home life is a struggle—his mother is all but rendered inert by mental illness, while his taskmaster father demands that, despite his young age, he pay rent to continue living at home. Steven takes over a company his older brother started, cleaning cars for dealerships around smoggy Los Angeles. To help him run the business, he hires Herb Jackson, a middle-aged African-American from the Deep South, wise in the ways of the world and eager for a job. A strange relationship develops with Steven as employer and Herb as adviser, drawing the younger man out of his shell while introducing him to the other cultures of the eclectic characters who join the business. They range from the geriatric polish-expert Speedy Dave to the potbellied West Virginian Andrew Calhoun, who brings his entire Appalachian clan, from his two sons to his mother-in-law, to work when necessary. But Herb, while principled, is far from perfect, and his gambling problem will soon lead the members of the car wash’s patchwork family into conflict with the dangerous, ascot-wearing, slick-haired bookie called “The Roach.” Heinz’s tale is presented in the form of a memoir, with its colorful cast of characters based on equally outlandish individuals from the author’s past and many of its events pulled from his own experiences dealing with cars. Motor enthusiasts will find many classic vehicles to wax nostalgic over, while the conversations that happen within these autos among Steven, Herb, and the others, complete with tall tales about chasing “poosy,” are always entertaining. The book’s commitment to rendering all the dialects of the wildly different characters is surprisingly smooth though somewhat problematic: accents are only affected by players who are lower-class or unconventionally educated. Race is a hot topic, particularly as it concerns Steven’s evolving awareness of the concept. But it does feel slightly underdeveloped, as the novel itself admits that the civil rights movement is just starting to make waves on the West Coast at the time the story is set.
A coming-of-age tale that bridges cultural gaps with sincerity and laughs.Pub Date: June 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9614-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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