The work of this Australian writer (Vanishing Points, 1992, etc.)—in a diction studded with some breathtaking images and conceits—continues to strengthen in depth and focus, and Astley again penetrates the shrouding canopies of loneliness to find the hope of rescue. Among those existing miserably amid ``excitability and want'' (a keystone indictment from Hunting the Wild Pineapple, 1991): a mild music teacher and his fearful/angry teenaged son; a priest and a bewildered nun; a desiccated aging single woman and a battered teenager. The four days during which Keith, 15-year-old son of piano- teacher Bernard Leverson, is unaccountably absent will seem in retrospect to have been years—of nonloving. Where is the love between father and son? To Keith, angry, bruised, and nasty, his father offers no ``rules,'' no safety; and mother Iris is having an affair with a family friend—actually a comically unlustful and boring friend. Bernard will speak and write of his worries to Fr. Doug Lingard, a Catholic priest, himself a tired victim of ``spiritual weightlessness.'' But Bernard finds everywhere ``this rolling dullness in human relationships.'' At a convent, where he gives exams in music, he witnesses the emotional aridity of a nun struggling with an empty heart, then escapes the screaming need of an achingly sad teacher. Meanwhile, on the lam, are Keith—as well as teenaged ``Chookie,'' forever unloved, a muddled Calaban, fleeing from a crime of rape. By the catastrophic close, a family is restored to love and the priest will know the brush of blessing in the act of ``restoring hope in another.'' Astley's style is occasionally choked perhaps, but also choked often with brilliants (on arriving patrons in a gloomy lounge: ``The room filled up with crustaceans—varnished hard-jawed mums and small-bit farmers all coated with the same malty staleness''). With humor and bite, then, some deep discoveries about shallow lives.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13875-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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