Kinflicks - Softcover

Alther, Lisa

3.77

1,003 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452276772 ISBN 13: 9780452276772

Publisher: Penguin, 1996

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In her first novel, Alther traces the troubled, funny, heartbreaking coming of age of Ginny Babcock Bliss during the l950s and '60s. The daughter of one of the first families in Hullsport, Tennessee, Ginny bounces from one identity to another, adopting the values, politics, lifestyle, even sexual orientation of each new partner. In "Kinflicks," Alther reels through the ups and downs of Ginny's life by dividing her narrative into two sequences: Ginny herself narrates the adventures of her past while a third-person narrator takes over to describe her present, when she returns to Hullsport as an adult to care for her dying mother. Mary Cantwell, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called "Kinflicks" "an almost flawless balance of light and dark, the skittery and the sad." "Ginny is the classic outsider, " noted the Saturday Review in a rave review of the book, "and her fine sense of the comic permits the novel to approach a kind of high seriousness...A best-seller? Sure. In the august company of "The Catcher in the Rye," "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and Huck? Yes, indeed."

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Review:

Orginally published in 1976 and re-released as a Virago Classic, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks remains remarkably fresh and provides the perfect read for a plane ride into another time zone. The hilarious odyssey of Ginny Babcock, a Southern peach gone rotten, was a manual of self-determination and irreverent pleasure for 70s feminists. Incredibly raunchy and explicit about anal sex, orgasm, vibrators, Tantric sex, blue balls and lesbian trysts, it is hard to believe it was written before Annie Sprinkle became a post-porn icon. The colourful, ribald prose begins with Ginny's childhood with a mother who's "an aficionado of calamity" and a father who anticipates an ugly death after an accident with a wedding ring, then cuts to Ginny returning to the hospital bedside of her dying mum. Each family first is captured by a Kodak M24 Instamatic-- hence Kinflicks, but not Ginny's deflowering which is "as meaningful as the breaking of a paper Saniband on a motel toilet." When Ginny drops out of college, takes to the land and to lesbianism in a steam of boiling soybeans, the inadequacy of her rural expertise is brilliantly told. Her subsequent marriage is interrupted by a Nam deserter-yogi. Each identity shift is marked by impressive wardrobe changes: cone bras, cardigans buttoned up the back, girdles, Ban the Bomb T-shirts, patchwork dresses and finally sadly, polyester jumpsuits. In a deft finale, mother and daughter reconcile without sentimentality and Ginny learns how to forego a life of fruitless self- denial and look death and singlehood in the eye. --Cherry Smyth

Review:

An ambitious, funny, lucid and unfailingly honest novel ... No other writer has yet synthesised (the coming of age in the 60's) as well as Ms Alther has (THE NEW YORKER)

A strong, salty, original talent ... It made me wonder what Tom Jones would be like written now (DORIS LESSING)

Dazzling talent ... brilliant, compelling ... wildly ribaldly funny (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY)

Orginally published in 1976 and re-released as a Virago Classic, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks remains remarkably fresh and provides the perfect read for a plane ride into another time zone. The hilarious odyssey of Ginny Babcock, a Southern peach gone rotten, (Cherry Smyth, AMAZON.CO.UK REVIEW)

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