The flabby plot is encrusted with jewels on every page. And if the race for city council can barely hold the candidate’s...
Beatty follows up the scorched-earth Afro-American satire of The White Boy Shuffle (1996) with an equally antic look at a brother from East Harlem who runs for City Council.
A tree grows in Brooklyn, but it’s no place for Winston (Tuffy) Foshay, first glimpsed coming around from a fainting fit that providentially took him out of the line of fire that terminated both his employment and his employers in a drug den in The Other Borough. What Winston needs, he soon decides, is some comforts a little closer to home: the loving arms of his wife Yolanda, joined to him in holy matrimony via a dial-a-preacher conference call to his prison ward; the inarticulate embraces of his son Bryce Extraordinaire (Jordy) Foshay; the bemused guidance of his fledgling Big Brother, Rabbi Spencer Throckmorton; the usual round of good-natured tussling with the men and women of East 109th Street; and maybe a political fling. The mad idea is Winston’s; the mad money behind it ($15,000, which he thinks of as three months of summer work at $5,000 a month) comes from aging Japanese activist Inez Nomura; but the waggish campaign slogans and strategies seem to sprout from every street corner in the ’hood. Billing himself as “ambivalent on drugs, guns, and alcohol in the community, against cats in the supermercados,” and “anti-cop, anti-cop, anti-cop,” Winston, who knows everyone in the district, doesn’t seem to ignite much more fervor than Steve Forbes, his equally surreal real-life opposite. Even Beatty himself seems no better able than his short-attention-span hero to focus on the election, which keeps getting elbowed aside by rollicking riffs on three-card monte, tales of inner-city white ethnics and black transvestites, and a gorgeous black/Jewish insult match.
The flabby plot is encrusted with jewels on every page. And if the race for city council can barely hold the candidate’s attention, that’s the punch line of Beatty’s richest joke. (First printing of 40,000)Pub Date: May 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40122-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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