An earnest and occasionally hair-raising record of emotional hopes and defeats in the life of an American middle-class male, from cradle to, maybe, his final reward in a happy marriage. Like Small's other characters (in Almost Famous, 1982, and The River in Winter, 1986), Earl Dimes is born in Maine and raised in central Pennsylvania by a drunken father and a lunatic mother named Nola Nichols, who sleeps away most of her son's childhood in narcoleptic collapse. She comes to at a few crucial moments in Earl's life: when his athletic, handsome, much-favored older half-brother Richie dies in a suspicious airplane crash (the plane was carrying drugs) just as Earl is leaving for Bentham College, where he has a scholarship; when Earl's father Jack dies swiftly from cancer; and later when Earl's own son, a frail, sweet 18-year-old boy named Keefer, sets himself on fire in a suicide attempt and dies gruesomely of his burns. In between, as Nola lies on a couch in a darkened room, Earl marries into a raucous, endearing Italian-American family, taking as bride a girl he's met at college; lives despairingly as an aspiring novelist-cum-high-school teacher and then busily and affluently as a management consultant; cheats on his wife; is deserted by her; and finds that he has no access to his then-12- year-old son, whom he adores and quickly loses track of as his wife moves to California. When, years later, Nola dies, she leaves Earl nothing, telling a mutual acquaintance: ``She said you never needed anything.'' Certainly this is the impression Earl works hard to give in this (you should pardon the expression) ``men's novel''—that is, until he meets and marries Marilyn and, ceding control, lives contentedly ever after. Long-winded but affecting.
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02991-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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