In his first-ever novel, prolific humorist Barry (Dave Barry Turns 50, 1998, etc.) proves just how easy it is, or at least how easy he can make it seem, for any zany with Miami connections to master what he artlessly calls “the Bunch of South Florida Wackos genre.” Here’s the scoop. Matt Arnold, the high-school son of an unsuccessful advertising man, wants to assassinate his classmate Jenny Herk, as per the rules of the Killer game they’re both playing, by shooting her with a water pistol. Jenny’s father Arthur, embezzling executive and bagman for a ludicrously corrupt construction business, is also the target of a pair of killers who are packing more serious heat. Both executions are about to be witnessed by Puggy, an oblivious drifter whose low-impact job at the Jolly Jackal bar has connected him to gadabout Russian arms dealers who’ve recently assumed possession of a really heavy suitcase filled with something that looks like a garbage disposal with a 45-minute timer. The FBI is interested in the Jolly Jackals; the Miami police are interested in the assassination attempts; and the kingdom of allegedly lower animals also plays an active role. Roger the dog thinks of every encounter with the human community in terms of a possible meal; a poisonous toad lives only to eat from Roger’s food dish; and a cobra named Daphne will play a timely role several bumps down the road. Barry juggles this ship of fools with a genial ease and a disarming lack of tension that suggest, maybe not Carl Hiassen, but the sweeter disposition of Laurence Shames. The big surprise is how readily adaptable Barry’s jokey rhythms are to the demands of creating characters and spinning them a farcical plot. But a host of lesser surprises are equally welcome. (First printing of 150,000; Literary Guild featured alternate; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14567-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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