From Amazon.com
It seems no accident that the narrator of Marianne Wiggins's sixth novel,
Almost Heaven, is named Holden. Like his literary predecessor in J.D. Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye, this edgy twentysomething war correspondent is also a protector of lost innocence, or at least a seeker of grace in a world gone brutal. Done in and emotionally damaged by a stint in Bosnia, Holden escapes back to the U.S. at a time when a rage of bad weather--tornadoes, heat waves, hurricanes--grips the nation and portends his immersion in a relationship of cyclonic intensity.
Once stateside, he entwines his fate with that of someone who is suffering from traumatic amnesia in response to the sudden loss of her entire family. For Melanie, Holden quickly becomes a life raft in a sea of random and unfathomable acts, and the two take off across the country in an attempt to escape the gathering storms, both real and metaphorical, that surround them. As Holden puts it: "One way or another someday, if not already, all of us will have left some one some where some dream some loneliness some thing."
Almost Heaven is an eclectic work, weaving together streams of desire, lost dreams, and sharp-edged commentary on America in its millennial madness into a haunting story of two people who succumb to erotic frenzy, both losing and finding themselves in each other. Wiggins, the prize-winning author of John Dollar, has produced a raw, kinetic book that explores the question of what it is like to run so hard from memory that it's as though your life never happened, as though you had just been born. --Marianne Painter
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
From Publishers Weekly
Heavy-handed symbolism and cryptic plot elements undermine Wiggins's (John Dollar) otherwise provocative novel about two people stunned by grief. Burned-out, Harvard-educated foreign correspondent Holden Garfield wishes he could erase his memories of the war in Bosnia, especially that of a crucified baby nailed to a tree. Melanie Page has also suffered trauma, but hers is so severe?she witnessed the death of her husband and four sons in a tornado?that her memory has vanished. Ironically, Holden may hold the key to her recovery, since his mentor and old friend was Melanie's brother, Noah Johns, who has gone underground for mysterious reasons. Holden decides to take Melanie (who now calls herself Johnnie) from the psychiatric wing of a Virginia hospital to South Dakota, where Noah is hiding. The journey becomes a quest for both of them and is complicated by sexual passion and Melanie's age: she is old enough to be Holden's mother. Holden is a puzzling figure: he calls his mother Kanga and his father Pooh; he has two college friends named Syd, who are marrying each other. He talks in insistently idiomatic dialogue, and Wiggins describes his thoughts in abrupt fragments meant to demonstrate his wired mental state. Wiggins's writing is intelligent, yet her manipulation of characters and themes is blatant. In addition to the repetitive connection between weather and human relationships, she offers interesting meditations on guilt; the mechanism and gestalt of memory and its "dark twin," amnesia; psychoanalytic theory; and the culture of the South. Her premise is promising: "If she could help him to forget [the horrors of war], he could help her to remember... they could learn to face their grief together." But the novel's abrupt and melodramatic conclusion (that we never learn why Noah is hiding is only one of the loose ends) leaves too many issues and relationships unresolved. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient de la
Hardcover
édition.
