Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Looking for a Miracle, August 4, 2008
This review is from: Dinosaurs on the Roof: A Novel (Hardcover)
It is easy to be drawn quickly and deeply into this book. Bernice, a middle-aged widow, has recently joined a cultish church whose pastor has the congregation believing that it will experience the Rapture that very night. Bernice's main concern is that her dogs will be fed once she has been "taken up."
What begins simply enough becomes the amazing 24-hour odyssey of Bernice Doorley and the parallel experience of her dead best friend's daughter Janet, who has been tapped to feed the dogs. Such a simple plot, peopled with ordinary-seeming women. How is it, then, that it all turns into a passionate and magnificent book?
The magic of Dinosaurs on the Roof is in its consistently rich and heartbreaking detail, the colorful and sometimes hilarious conversations, and the ability of both to cement permanently into the reader's emotional memory.
Everyone in this book is looking for a miracle; something to pitch them out of the dreary ordinariness of life. Is this it, they want to know, is this all? It can't be-I won't let it be all! Despite the humor, it takes guts to accompany Bernice on her epic struggle towards Rapture. David Rabe leads the reader through some anguishing and difficult moments, indeed. But he is to be trusted. He will lead you out, and you will be smiling.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Demons of our Human Nature, August 4, 2008
This review is from: Dinosaurs on the Roof: A Novel (Hardcover)
I took DINOSAURS ON THE ROOF with me to a remote location in the mountains. Cut off from phone, internet, and contact with the world of humans, I read Mr. Rabe's book in the late afternoons, after hiking and exploring and making contact with the wilderness.
Undoubtedly, Janet and Bernice are not easy characters to love: absolutely chock-full of flaws, both of them are ornery, self-centered, and slow to forgive. Yet there wasn't a false note about them; they reminded me of people I knew, or have known, and so, I chose to hang out with them while they both made their way toward the epiphanies they sought: Bernice chasing the rapture of the Last Days, with Janet chasing human feeling while constantly numbing herself out with Jack Daniels.
It would be giving too much away to tell you which one of them finds a more true redemption, but I will say that there is much to admire in this book. Rabe is a playwright, and his gift for dialogue shines in this book. Much of the plot is moved forward by the conversations between characters, which is a remarkable feat in this day and age when we tend to admire the literary pyrotechnics of characters moving forward through metaphor and symbolism to get to their truths.
Here, human truths are hashed out in human ways: by talking through them--not always pleasantly. I found myself feeling like an eavesdropper, listening to two old women argue over the righteousness of their pastor, or Janet pleading for what she needs from people to whom she's willing to really give nothing.
Mr. Rabe is a keen observer of the human condition, and this is not a book for those who seek immediate gratification. Given that so much of this book is about the quest for that kind of immediate gratification, Mr. Rabe has crafted a book whose form follows its message.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Way of All Flesh, June 16, 2008
This review is from: Dinosaurs on the Roof: A Novel (Hardcover)
David Rabe's plays were the reason I was eager to read Dinosaurs on the Roof, for I've always admired the energy in his drama. Initially I had trouble 'getting into it', but thereafter I was fully engaged. Several mid-western-isms struck my ear as `off', but that's my problem, not Rabe's. I wondered initially whether the novel's theme of redemption was working until I saw it at work: the Rapture embraced by Bernice. That's all we have, our particular raptures, the embraces of life we must believe in or else our lives are derailed. Janet must cross the Styx before she finds her rapture, and within the crossing she thinks a number of times she may have found it (Robbie, for example). For her, for the moment, she thinks the rapture is sex until she finds it isn't that at all. She's just missing a center she may just find by novel's end - and if she doesn't, then she'll remain in hell. But each of us, as we also see in Bernice, has his hell, and as the child is father of the man, so we see Janet in her turn perhaps becoming what Bernice is now, the difference, other than the major one of religion, being only generational. Unable to shed our skins, we are all alike under the sun: desire, dying, bodily functions, hope, despair, love - we all possess these and other aspects to a greater or lesser degree.. However, the beauty of the perspective in `Dinosaurs' regards the redemptive. We look for a rapture in our forgiveness, toward others, toward ourselves. Bernice is illustrative of the 1st (and something of the 2nd) ; Janet, the 2nd. Humor in Dinosaurs on the Roof is displayed in the ironic plasticity of the reading moment where one through the dialog or narrative becomes involved in that moment - in that humor - where the characters see no humor in the moment at all. Dinosaurs on the Roof, a major achievement, will not surprise those who know Rabe's work.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
