A put-upon teenager runs away from home and winds up traveling the world, living a rock ’n’ roll fantasy in Williams' debut novel.
It takes Frederick Mathews exactly one week to start a new school, get into trouble and find himself homeless. Setting the tone for the rest of the book, an unaffected Frederick spends exactly one night on the streets before stumbling into a band’s practice space and, almost immediately, becoming their new bassist. Despite being sent out on the streets to sell drugs in order to fund the band, Frederick thinks he’s got it made—until he comes face-to-face with the bandleader’s ego during an extended engagement in Japan. The newly christened Fred Noize takes mere minutes to become the force behind a new band, Mangled Noize, whose setbacks and struggles don’t affect Fred in the least. That’s the shame of this book because Fred and Mangled Noize face some real difficulties: being stranded in a country where they can’t speak the language, radio stations in the United States won’t play their songs, a conniving woman thinks getting pregnant by Fred is her lifelong gravy train, encounters with heroin, the requisite hard drinking, and the pain of realizing that six years later, you’re unrecognizable to your own sister. Plum opportunities to build reader empathy through characterization are regrettably ignored. Instead, the book reads like rock star propaganda: the worst part of touring is a smelly tour bus bathroom, the girls are all perfect—and perfectly willing—and on-tour downtime can be spent exploring the city you’re in. This latter reveals one of author Williams’ weaknesses—many details of the rock ’n’ roll life add to the feel of fantasy while detracting from the book’s credibility. Overpopulated with secondary characters whose presence adds color but not depth, Fred’s adventures are told more than shown, a detriment to what could otherwise have been a very real, poignant tale of a young man who never lets the bad get him down.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463757199
Page Count: 270
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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